Advertisement

Big 12 unanimously votes to reinstate title game in 2017

Nick Bromberg
College football and motorsports writer

With or without expansion, the Big 12 is bringing back its conference title game.

The conference said Friday its schools had voted unanimously to have the game, which could bring in more than $25 million in estimated revenue. The decision to reinstitute the game starting in 2017 comes despite the conference's current 10-team format meaning all of the schools play each other once during the conference season.

R.I.P. "One True Champion." You had a good run.

[Check out Dr. Saturday on Tumblr for entertaining things you won’t see on the blog]

The Big 12 went to the round-robin schedule when it was downsized to 10 teams after Texas A&M, Missouri, Nebraska and Colorado left the conference. The conference had been prohibited from hosting a title game because it had less than 12 teams, though a rule change earlier this year scrapping the 12-team minimum meant the conference could opt to host a title game. And it's doing so.

Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said the conference was better off – in regards to the College Football Playoff – taking the risk of an upset happening in the title game than not doing so despite the round-robin schedule. He also said that he felt the Big 12 would have the "strongest" position of all of the Power Five conferences by having both a title game and a schedule where everyone plays everyone else.

"“The addition of a football championship game allows for a 13th data point for our teams under consideration for the College Football Playoff,” Bowlsby said in the conference's release. “Work will begin on developing scheduling models and host site options.”

Of course, the title game could also put the Big 12 in the weakest position. Imagine if the second-place team in the conference has two losses and faces a team in the provisional College Football Playoff top four that's undefeated in the title game.

Got it? Now imagine that two-loss team winning. If and when that does, it's going to be incredibly hard for the Big 12 to campaign for a CFP spot unless similar scenarios happen in the other Power Five conferences' title games. This is the Big 12 after all. Don't be surprised if that happens sooner, rather than later.

And the second-best team in the conference may not end up playing the best team in the title game anyway. The Big 12 is apparently considering going to two divisions of five teams. If division champions play each other, it's conceivable one division could be much stronger than the other, similiar to when the Big 12 South was the dominant division over the North when the conference had 12 teams.

Those scenarios are why it's odd for the conference to take such a rash action in regards to the playoff. The Big 12's top teams lost out on the CFP in 2014 despite wins in the final week while Oklahoma made the CFP in 2015, but is two years' of playoff data really worth changing up the format of the conference?

Especially without expansion, which sounds like it's not going to be happening anytime soon. A title game makes sense with 12 or more teams, but the conference doesn't sound (again) like it's rushing to add more teams.

It's also not going to be adding a television network either as Texas has the Longhorn Network and would need significant revenue concessions to give it up.

The conference also announced that its member schools would each receive a payout of $30.4 million for this year, a 20 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.

[Visit Dr. Saturday on Facebook for stories you might have missed and chat with the writers]

- - - - - - -

Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!