Big 12 bringing back conference championship game in 2017
Big 12 Conference unanimously voted Friday to bring back a conference championship game. With a round robin conference schedule, this doesn't make much sense except for a potential money grab.
They also will most likely create two 5-team divisions. Not sure what the point of that is either.
Makes perfect sense. They have been left out of the college football playoff because of this.
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The year before that the winner of TCU vs. Baylor would have gotten in ahead of OSU.
Well, they did play each other and Baylor won. If you meant during a conference championship game, chances are they would be in the same division and thus would not have played another game.
They did. Navigate came up with I think, a 5% increase in the chances of making the playoffs with a Championship game. Football Study Hall was able to duplicate the results but only under certain assumptions.
www.footballstudyhall.com/2016/5/17/11683756/big-12-expansion-championship-game-playoff-odds
Navigate! That's right, thanks
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yeah but oklahoma played tennessee (and ohio st this year), while baylor/tcu played no one at all and could not have been taken seriously by the committee last year
In fact, wasn't one of the motivating factors for bringing Nebraska into the Big10 to get up to the necessary 12 teams for a Big10 championship game, because the Big10 teams would all slide in the rankings after the other conferences had their championship games?
No guarantee they would have made the playoff even if Baylor & TCU met in a conference championship game. I still think this creates one more unnecessary hurdle for a playoff contender when the round robin conference schedule already can determine a champ.
Bowlsby notes that five times a lower-ranked team upset a higher-ranked team when Big 12 had a title game.
— Chuck Carlton (@ChuckCarltonDMN) June 3, 2016
And in four of those five ('96, '98, '01, '07) it knocked the higher-seeded team out the BCS title game. https://t.co/d34lfGzAfN
— Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) June 3, 2016
I think the issue is more that the Big12 champ doesn't get a big win to end the season on, like other conference champs (they also get one less game). So a one-loss Big12 champ gets jumped in the polls when the 4 other Power 5 champs all potentially beat a quality opponent the last week of the season.
It can be hard to argue that a 11-1 OU or TCU or whoever should be ahead of a 12-1 team who just ended their season by beating the #2 team in their conference (especially, if that TCU or OU team ends their season beating up on TTech or ISU or something).
I think the Big 12 getting left out in 2014 had more to do with their nonconference schedule than what note the season ended on. Baylor beat TCU in the regular season. The issue Baylor had was their nonconference schedule was just awful. I don't know if beating TCU in a rematch could have changed that.
I think it is shortsighted to focus on one year's result. If Oklahoma had to play a conference championship game rematch last year and lost to TCU, it is quite likely that the Big 12 would have been left out for Stanford or even possibly OSU. As noted above, there were multiple instances during the BCS era where the conference championship game knocked the Big 12 out of the BCS Championship Game. But at least back then, you could justify it as a 12-team conference setup cannot allow for a round robin schedule.
And to make matters worse, they are planning on making two unnecessary 5-team divisions which will make it less likely that the two best teams make the championship game. My guess is that they may put Texas & Oklahoma in the same division to avoid the possibility of a rematch, but who knows. Nothing the Big 12 does makes sense to me.
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It does make perfect sense. As long as the CFP is a game of musical chairs where one Power Five champ is going to be left out, they need to have a championship game for, as the saying goes now, "one more data point."
I hope a Texas Tech team that is 8-4 knocks off an undefeated/ one loss TCU or Ok in their first Champ game.
It may not make sense with 10 teams, but who thinks they will stay at this number for long? Might as well get the TV contract for their championship game before the TV market implodes. By all accounts, it doesn't look like they're in the position to lure any big fish into their conference, but more money can't hurt.
I think they add 2, 4, or even 6.
Houston, Cincinnati, BYU, UCF, Memphis, and Colo St
Boise St, UConn, USF, or ECU are the wild cards.
When they were able to hang onto Herman I was certain part of the selling to him was they had a wink-wink deal that they were going to be part of the Big12 expansion. Pure speculation on my part but it just didn't add up why he would stay there otherwise.
So the question now is.....Every Power 5 Conference has a Championship game. That means the odds of some conference or conferences getting left out will increase. Who is it going to be and don't let the SEC get two teams in...where a Big 10 or Big 12 team gets left out. I mean if Alabama were to lose the SEC Championship and still get in the playoff....then what? Because we all know Alabama somehow magically gets penciled in with the committee.
The committee has already said there is extra weight for conference championships. I think in most years it is going to be extremely unlikely that a team that loses their conference championship game gets into the playoff. I think the more likely scenario is a 1-loss team that loses their division and gets left out of the conference championship game. This almost happened to Alabama last year, but Ole Miss ended up losing that crazy game to Arkansas.
There are 4 spots for 5 conferences. That seems like a 100% chance a champ is excluded. How did that change?
So... They have the perfect situation to determine a conference champion. Yet... This. OK.
too much logic in your post for it to work.
I agree there are ways to determine a champ, but ANY beauty contest component sucks. Just me 2 cents. Sick of popularity contests determining who gets a seat at the table.
The flaw with head-to-head, for instance, is that it can reward the team that had the objectively worse overall season. For example, let's say Oklahoma and TCU both finish the conference schedule at 8-1, and Oklahoma wins the tiebreaker for beating TCU head-to-head. Okay, so TCU's loss was to Oklahoma, the best opponent on their conference schedule. Oklahoma could not have lost to the best opponent on their conference schedule (TCU), so they must have lost to an inferior opponent. Now, if Oklahoma's loss was to a good Texas or OK State team and they beat TCU convincingly, nobody has an issue with them being the champs. But what if Oklahoma beat TCU in a close game, while their loss was to a significantly inferior opponent, such as Kansas or Iowa State? Then you'd be crowning OU champs, even though TCU probably had the better overall performance.
needs controversy.
Remember when the B1G wasn't allowed to have a championship game because they didn't have 12 teams? I miss those days.
How do you slice it? East/West is awkward. North/South favors Oklahoma too much. Maybe competitive balance without caring about geography. They are getting a rematch regardless, but I am sure they want to avoid back-to-back weeks.
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So, since they must be tinkering with divisional alignments if this is the case, I wonder what those would look like? I assume it would be something like "Traditional Teams" and "The Division With West Virginia" - just guessing on the names there, but I do seriously wonder how they would be split.
I can't see a way that east/west or north/south works well for them.
Texas, TCU, Baylor, Kan St, Iowa St
Okla, Okla St, WVU, TX Tech, Kansas
I think they will expand anyway.
Just bring back all the old "conferences" please.
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It's kind of ridiculous. Having teams play every single other team in the conference is a much better way of determining a champion than a single game.
So if a team that's 9-0 loses to a team that's 7-2 in the conference, the latter gets to be the champion even though they wouldn't even have a winning record against the team they played and would have more losses in the conference?
With more than 10 teams it makes more sense because you can't play everyone, but when you can play everyone that should be the true champion.
Also, you can't have divisions because everyone plays everyone so there is no distinction. If there were divisions you could end up with the 3rd best team in the conference getting in over the 2nd best team even though they played the exact same schedule (that can happen in other conferences, but the teams will not have played the exact same schedule).
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um because it's supposed to be NON PROFIT and there's no justifiable competitive reason. Forced =/ big event
i'm it will fail utterly for these reasons and piss off everyone, when a 12-0 team goes down to a team it already beat or oklahoma/texas play a 2nd time