TSS columnist Allen Kenney — who really is college football’s finest mind (others are as smart, but no one’s noticeably smarter) — is a Big 12 expert. Naturally, he got to the heart of the matter with the Big 12 and its playoff-based discontents the other day:
what i hate about playoff: november in big 12 is awesome- 4 best teams playing round robin. instead convo centers around playoff positioning
— Allen Kenney (@BlatantHomerism) November 11, 2015
Allen’s statement speaks to several realities all at once. These realities point to how the Big 12 is being overlooked here, diminished there, and misperceived over there. All the while, college football — so eager to want to slot every team in its proper place well before the dust has settled — gets a little too obssessed with the big picture instead of enjoying big games and the conference championship races, which are really what this sport’s all about.
It used to mean so much to a team to be able to get pelted by sugar cubes (SEC) or oranges (Big Eight) on the field. Teams reveled in going to the bowl game associated with winning their conference. Generations of young boys in Texas wanted to play in the Cotton Bowl game. Farmboys in Nebraska and Oklahoma wanted to make their way to the foreign country known as Miami on New Year’s night. Southern boys wanted to play in the Sugar Bowl and have Keith Jackson and Frank Broyles on hand, calling their names in the Louisiana Superdome.
Those parts of college football have been relegated to the past. The sport is worse off as a result.
However, let’s not lay this at the doorstep of the College Football Playoff. This is more about the Bowl Championship Series than the playoff.
(If you’re wondering how the Big 12 fits, we’ll get to that in a bit.)
The Bowl Championship Series is the plan/concept/framework which removed the charm of the bowls from college football. The BCS was the sport’s first big and conscious attempt to create a national championship game/system/structure… and it gave rise to what we have today.
The BCS should be remembered (I don’t know if it will, but it SHOULD) as a missed opportunity for college football. The BCS could have incorporated cherished bowl identities and traditions into a playoff system, much as this current format does. Had this current playoff and bowl format existed in place of the BCS from 1998 through 2013, the Cotton and Peach Bowls would have remained cherished events, instead of falling off the map for a long time. The bowls which — in a BCS context — played host to a particularly meaningful game once every four years would have been able to host meaningful games much more frequently due to the existence of playoff semifinals.
Many people who think the BCS is better than a four-team playoff do not (this is opinion, not fact) account for this reality when making their historical assessments and judgments. The BCS is what poisoned the well in terms of the relationship between the regular season and the postseason in college football. The playoff format we have now is flawed, but it’s still a gigantic (not modest, not tiny) improvement over the system we previously tolerated.
Now, to the Big 12’s place in this world…
*
The BCS, with its emphasis on two and only two teams in the national title hunt, created a very intense conversation around each college football season. With four teams, that discussion is still intense, but not on the same scale. Two teams which would have been outraged by their exclusion in the BCS era now get into the national-title derby. Sure, there will always be an argument on the margins of the debate: In the BCS, it was 2 versus 3 for the final spot; now, it’s 4 versus 5 for the College Football Playoff. However, two more teams get in, removing a whole host of debates from the process. Eliminating a fifth-place team is an easier — or at least, more justifiable — process because that team will have a loss far more often than a No. 3 team will (and did in the BCS era).
To specifically reference Allen’s astute point above, he’s fundamentally right on the dynamics. We are so attuned to slotting teams into the playoff and judging whether they should be in or out that we don’t allow the season to play out. However, now that we’re discussing four teams instead of two, we’re actually moving in the right direction, not the wrong one. The debates are no longer about who’s the best conference champion (a BCS-era conversation), but who’s the worst conference champion. The value of a conference championship has been increased, not reduced, by the playoff system, even as lingering deficiencies in the culture of college football remain.
Big 12 fans are obviously worried that their conference champion will be seen as the worst of the lot. Understandably, the memory of seeing TCU and Baylor locked outside the candy store in 2014 is foremost in the minds of Big 12 partisans. Should this mean they ought to worry?
Well… this is where Allen’s point reigns supreme.
Almost every big game in the Big 12 this season remains to be played. TCU-Oklahoma State occurred last Saturday, but almost EVERY OTHER HUGE GAME is coming up.
Oklahoma-Baylor. TCU-Oklahoma. Oklahoma-Oklahoma State.
Baylor-Oklahoma State. Baylor-TCU.
All those games haven’t been played yet, and they’ll tell us how the Big 12 stacks up — internally, as its own organism, and in relationship to other conferences.
If the Big 12 produces an unbeaten champion, the one true source of intrigue will be if 12-1 Alabama gets voted in over that champion. That would be the ultimate litmus test — and source of controversy — for the playoff system as a whole.
If the Big 12 cannibalizes itself such that no team is unbeaten, the team with the best non-conference win (Oklahoma, at Tennessee) needs to be the 11-1 team which emerges from the mess. People who defend or criticize the Big 12 in terms of various metrics need to keep in mind that the specific (foremost) representative of the league is what will really matter in a close call with 11-1 Notre Dame or 12-1 Stanford. Given the number of huge games still left in the Big 12, however, it’s rather pointless to engage in that kind of speculation at this early stage.
On Nov. 21, Baylor plays Oklahoma State and TCU plays Oklahoma. OU-Baylor is first up this weekend, but it’s not until those two games are played that we’ll have a clear sense of how the Big 12 puzzle fits.
Many of us in the world of college football punditry do indeed race to the finish line in terms of mapping out who’s in and who’s not. Driven by the BCS era’s narrow focus on two teams, this four-team playoff era contains that same kind of intensity, but on a smaller scale.
Big 12 fans — scarred by 2014 — are finding it hard to see how this system is an improvement from the BCS. (Then again, they remember 2011 and the Oklahoma State team which is once again at the center of the conversation in college football, so maybe they can see the merits of the playoff after all.)
My advice to Big 12 fans is the same as Allen Kenney’s: Watch, evaluate, and enjoy the exciting and tasty Big 12 matchups of the next two weeks, beginning with Sooners-Bears in Waco.
