NEW YORK — Bob Bowlsby certainly favors the 2015 College Football Playoff over the 2014 version that left his league reeling from rejection. So that’s one up and one down for the Big 12 under the new postseason system, and too soon for the pensive commissioner to predict whether expansion, or re-installing a championship game, or both, or neither is the proper strategy.
The dueling perspectives:
—Oklahoma reaching the national semifinals entirely vindicates the Big 12’s decision to stand pat at only 10 members.
—The Sooners winning the Big 12 outright only to wind up as the No. 4 seed proves there’s reason to sweat even the good years.
Both positions resonate with Bowlsby.
“We just need to continue to watch the landscape,” he said Tuesday. “We’re a little smaller, we don’t have a championship game, and we do play a round-robin. So you’ve got to keep asking yourself if you want to be different in three or four significant ways. There may come a time when we don’t.”
His comments came after a roundtable of commissioners at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum—Bowlsby sharing a stage with the SEC’s Greg Sankey and the ACC’s John Swofford. Not in attendance were the two commissioners who are giving the Big 12 grief, Jim Delany of the Big Ten and Larry Scott from the Pac-12.
Delany’s league recently submitted a last-minute amendment to the Big 12’s legislation seeking to stage a conference championship game without the requisite 12 schools split into tidy divisions. Scott, whose league is feeling the left-behind sting from this year’s final four, postured how it’s unfair for the Big 12 winner to avoid playing a title game.
Bowlsby appreciates his football neighbors sharing their advice so he returns some of his own:
“They’d like to see us play a championship, and I’d like to see them play a full round-robin.”
That everyone-plays-everyone schedule featured a mini-robin in November with the Big 12’s top four teams interacting. While Oklahoma (11-1) beat Baylor and Oklahoma State handily, it needed a 2-point knockdown to survive TCU 30-29.
Fearing those teams would “carve each other up and we would’ve ended up with damaged goods at the end,” Bowlsby said he was rooting for somebody to run the table. When the Sooners obliged, he settled in for a happier December.
“But I was in a patently unhappy place last year,” he said, “so it’s a relatively low bar.”
Check out the Gold Blue Lunch Report for more on the Big 12 and Dana Holgorsen’s future.