The Big 12 Is Left Out; Should Expansion Be Next?

Baylor and TCU Left Out. Well, that was something.  Both Baylor and TCU were both left out of the first College Football Playoff, just outside the top 4, as Baylor finished 5th and TCU finished 6th.  It's strange to learn how this all worked and if I had to guess as to a method to the madness is that the CFP Committee used a resume method up until the bitter end with Baylor's non-conference being awful and TCU losing it's head-to-head to Baylor, then the Big 12 is out.  As to why Baylor wasn't ranked ahead of TCU until the last rankings? I'm guessing that the committee couldn't put Baylor in front of TCU until the very end when Baylor played another ranked team in Kansas State.  Does that sound right?  So yeah, I think if Baylor plays a middle of the road team in non-conference play, then they are in for sure.  For me, the lack of naming a champion seemed to have, little if any effect. The lack of a championship game?  Oh heck yes.

Here's LAJ's Nicholas Talbot:

That's why the league presented Baylor and TCU as co-champions, even though both played the same schedules and Baylor beat TCU 61-58 on Oct. 11.

In the end, the Big 12's slogan of "One True Champion" proved even less effective than the BCS - at least under that format the fans, players and administrators could pretend that a "true" champ had been crowned.

This year, thanks to the four-team playoff, everyone will get an even better idea of who the best college football team in the nation is. Sure, there are glaring holes in the formula that an eight-team playoff would seemingly fix.

But, at least there will be "One True Champion" in college football this season.

It just won't come from the Big 12.

You thought you were going to get out of single sentence paragraph Monday?  Ha! #SorryNotSorry  Seriously though, I don't think it had anything to do with the slogan or not "naming" a champion, but it was more important to play for a championship.

Here's FoxSports David Ubben dropping some truth bombs:

Bob Bowlsby was an easy target after a bit of flip-flopping from July to December on the tiebreaker (he said Sunday that he "misspoke" in July when he said the Big 12 would always have a champion via head-to-head) and on the slogan, but he wasn't doing anything more than applying an agreed-upon tiebreaker that applied only to the Big 12's automatic qualifying bowl, not to the playoff itself. That's true, even if no one from the Big 12 managed to present a coherent answer on the issue over the last month.

Bowlsby campaigning for one team comes at the cost of denigrating another team's Big 12 title. His job is to remain neutral within the league and promote it outside the league's footprint.

Besides a PR disaster surrounding the tiebreaker, Bowlsby's been an exemplary commissioner who represents the league well and has a respected voice on issues surrounding college athletics. The league's board of directors won't even entertain a cha

If anything, it sounds as if the Big 12 members didn't have their stuff together before figuring out the playoff tiebreaker and Bowlsby was adhering to those agreed upon items.  That would most likely include Baylor and TCU agreeing to those terms as well so they should maybe consider looking in the mirror first and foremost. Sounds reasonable to me, but what do I know.

Should the Big 12 Consider Expansion? It's more than just the College Football Playoffs that the teams missed.  By not having a championship game, the Big 12 lost out on the opportunity to send at at least 1 team to the playoffs and Bring On The Cats' Jon Morse opines that the egg on the face is bad enough, but now the Big 12 is losing some pretty big dollars because of their stance, at least $4million, not to mention the handful of teams that don't go to a bowl game.

It's worse than that, of course. The Big 12's round-robin schedule is great, aesthetically. Everyone playing everyone is absolutely the proper way to do things. But in a Machiavellian sense, taking into consideration the realities of the situation, what it really does is put the Big 12 at a disadvantage. The SEC is sending 12 teams to bowl games. The Big 10 is sending 10. Even the ACC is sending 11.

The Big 12 is sending 7. That's at least 3 bowl games worth of revenue the Big 12 isn't receiving -- revenue the Big 12 absolutely would receive if they operated under the same model in which the number of losses suffered by conference members is reduced. The Big 12 has to suffer an average of 4.5 losses per team no matter what happens in the non-conference. The SEC only has to suffer 4.0. That makes a huge difference.

So when we're told that Big 12 schools can expect $22 million a year in revenue and that any new members need to be worth something close to that in order to justify adding them... that's nonsense., because not having them is actually costing the league nearly an entire team's worth of revenue -- and that's not even counting the revenues to be gained from holding a conference championship game in the first place or the long-term and very real financial cost of being left out in the cold and eroded goodwill. These things add up, and the core mistake the Big 12 schools -- some of them, anyway -- have been making is to fail to look past the ends of their noses.

So where does this land the Big 12? Morse thinks the Big 12 needs to move forward with expansion, that saying that a team does or does not add to the market is fine and all, but lack of having 12 or 14 teams is costing the Big 12 real money. Significant money. For the record.  Yeah, I don't really care about markets any more.  It's time.  The Big 12 is falling behind and I'm afraid that continuing to wait on the idealistic "Pac-16" may be like waiting for that girl to say yes and she just teases you and you eventually miss out on so many other possibilities because you were waiting on the dream scenario.

Morse's candidates are the ones we've always discussed:  BYU, Central Florida / South Florida, Cincinnati, Memphis and Northern Illinois.  Bring on the two Florida schools, BYU and Cincinnati and call it a day.