With the news that Seth Russell is out for the rest of the season as Baylor’s starting quarterback, we are reminded that the Big 12 schedule is the biggest reason the conference title is entirely up for grabs, with four schools having a legitimate claim to the throne and three of them being unbeaten entering the final weekend of October.
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If Andre Agassi’s statement — “image is everything” — represents an accurate portrayal of the commercial world, another statement captures a central reality of the college football world: “timing is everything.”
The influence of the Big 12 schedule on this year’s league race is impossible to overstate. This is true for a number of reasons, but the starting point for this discussion is one of the most counterintuitive truths of the 2015 college football season.
When viewed through a specific lens, the Big 12, of all the conferences in the country — especially the Power 5 — should have the least-scrutinized schedule in the Football Bowl Subdivision. The league is the only one in the Power 5 which pits every member school against each other. Nine games in a 10-team league. Everyone plays everyone. What’s there to examine beyond home-and-road splits?
In the SEC, Alabama frequently misses Georgia and Florida on the schedule. LSU doesn’t play Tennessee with great regularity. Those are just a few examples.
In the Big Ten, Iowa avoided Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State. The Hawkeyes will have to play one of them in the event that they hold on in the Big Ten West, but avoiding the other two should carry Kirk Ferentz’s team to a 12-1 record, which means a New Year’s Six ticket. An 11-2 record might not.
In the ACC, Duke does not play Clemson or Florida State very often. North Carolina does not face the Tigers or Seminoles this season. The same goes for Pittsburgh.
In the Pac-12, Stanford and Utah will not play in the regularly-scheduled 12-game slate, though they are on a collision course, headed for the Pac-12 Championship Game. This is an unlikely avoidance in the schedule, since Pac-12 teams must play four of the six teams in the opposite division. Utah and Stanford eluded each other in the nine-game conference schedule. UCLA did not have to play Oregon. USC had to play Oregon and Stanford. Arizona State had to play Oregon but not Stanford.
The imbalances in these conference schedules carry a lot of weight, and what’s more is that in many cases, certain teams aren’t going to play each other in regular seasons for many years. Alabama isn’t coming back to Georgia for a full decade (at least).
The Big 12 doesn’t have any of these issues, with all its teams playing each other.
Yet, to get back to the start of this piece, how can the Big 12 schedule so profoundly influence who’s in position to win the league title, especially now that Seth Russell is out in Waco?
Timing.
Is.
Everything.
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The very simple reality of the Big 12 schedule is that it is back-loaded. This is a smart move by Bob Bowlsby, not only because it puts the league front and center in November, when the CFB Playoff Selection Committee is paying very close attention, but because November is the month (more than September and October, at any rate) when teams have solidified into identities and have been able to work through problems which might have emerged early in the season.
That last point doesn’t require a lot of elaboration, but just to drive the point home, the history of the Miami-Florida State rivalry shows why timing matters in college football.
Miami was the team which was sound and sturdy in early October, ready to use a comparatively simple plan to win games. Florida State was a lot more ambitious on offense, less inclined to make the basic play but more capable of making the spectacular one. For almost all of the great battles between those two teams from 1987 through 2001 — when Canes-Noles was THE most important and definitive college football rivalry in the nation — the game was played no later than the middle of October. In many of those games, the turbocharged Florida State offense just hadn’t hit its peak yet. That — and some wide-right kicks — enabled the Hurricanes to win more national championships than the Noles.
The simple follow-up point is this: If those games had all been played in the middle of November instead of the first half of the season, Florida State and Bobby Bowden probably would have walked away with more wins and more national titles. Earlier in the season, Miami’s teams gained an advantage.
In the 2015 Big 12, consider how timing has affected the league race:
1) If Baylor had already played any of the other top four teams in the conference — Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, or TCU — it would have been in great position to win. Without Seth Russell, it still could win, but OU, OSU, and TCU have to feel better about their chances.
2) If any of the other teams in the top four had played TCU in early October or even in the past week and a half, the Horned Frogs’ defense — ravaged by injuries — probably wouldn’t have been able to hold up. TCU has reached a bye week and gained a chance to give its back seven some extra film study and preparation for the road ahead. That’s not decisive, but it’s valuable, one would think.
3) Baylor was in position to absolutely crush TCU had the teams played in early October.
Timing.
Is.
Everything.
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It could be that the results of November’s back-loaded Big 12 schedule will imitate the results which would have emerged in a series of hypothetical early-October meetings. Nevertheless, certain teams can’t help but think that with a different order of play, their odds of winning the Big 12 and making the College Football Playoff would be a lot better… or worse.
Andre Agassi might have been wrong when he said that “image is everything,” but let’s simply acknowledge that he wasn’t talking about college football when he made that statement.
Timing trumps image any day of the week when college football scheduling is discussed.
