A few days ago it was announced that the Big 12 conference voted to add a conference championship game in the year 2017. This is the first time the Big 12 will have a championship game since 2010. The reason it lost the championship game is because it became a 10 team conference. Now that it is back it should be a good thing for the conference, but there comes problems with it.
Along with this announcement, the Big 12 also announced that they will likely split up the conference into two five team division but still play a round robin format. And that doesn’t make much sense. With a ten team conference, it is tough to do divisions of five. Because if you’re going to do round robin, then there is really no need for divisions, just have the best two teams play at the end. But if you don’t do round robin, you still have to play eight conference teams, and then that leaves just one team you don’t play. So really the conference should just not split into divisions and just have the teams with the two best records play in the conference championship game.
Having a conference championship game should overall be a good thing though. Once the College Football Playoff started you really started to see the negative effects of not having a conference championship game. Berry Tramel of The Oklahoman pointed out this fact in his article, “Two years running, the Big 12 champ has dropped at least one spot in the rankings after the December championship games. It didn’t cost the Sooners a spot in the playoff last season, but it cost the Sooners a spot in Arlington. Instead, OU played in faraway Miami.” Two years ago, it cost two Big 12 teams big time. In 2014 there was a clear top three teams, Florida State, Alabama, and Oregon. The question was who would the fourth team be. If you look at Baylor, TCU, and Ohio State through their first 12 games, Baylor and TCU were ahead of Ohio State. The reason Ohio State made the playoffs that year is because they were allowed to impress in a 13th game, a 59-0 win over Wisconsin, that Baylor and TCU weren’t allowed to play in. So we will see how the Big 12 decides to do it, but just the fact that there is now a conference championship now is a positive step for the conference.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
