Big XII raises big questions
— -- As one arrives on the TCU campus, he is greeted with a billboard just off University Drive. The stylized logo of the Big XII is in unmistakable Horned Frog white and gray and trimmed in Horned Frog purple. Beneath the logo is the conference slogan we've come to know so well: One True Champion.
Similar signs line streets in the conference's other college towns, their colors customized to the home team. But if this weekend's dominoes fall the right -- or, depending on your point of view, wrong -- way, the conference office might need to send staffers scrambling to those signs with cans of spray paint for some quick editing: One TWO True ChampionS. On Monday morning, they might have to replace the message altogether, with braggadocious billboards touting "Half The Playoff Bracket, Y'all!"
If that happens -- and it totally could -- would the people who run the playoff, or at least the four Power Five conferences that don't include a roman numeral, start looking at a rewrite of their own? Would they move to close the loophole that the Big XII is about to bumrush? Or would they walk over the conference HQ -- located literally across the street from the playoff offices -- and politely suggest they add a couple of teams?
When the newest playoff rankings were unveiled Tuesday night, TCU had moved up to the No. 3 spot. Their only loss this season was to conference foe Baylor, which ranks sixth, just behind Ohio State, which will play this weekend's Big Ten title game without its starting quarterback, and two spots behind Florida State, which has struggled in recent weeks and will face a suddenly hot Georgia Tech squad in the ACC title game. Meanwhile, second-ranked Oregon will face Arizona, the team that handed the Ducks their worst losses of the past two seasons, in the Pac-12 championship.
Call it gaming the system or stupid luck, but TCU and Baylor making up half of the bracket could happen. And if it does, the conference that entered the season supposedly hampered by the lack of a championship game will have ended up owning half the playoff because of it, taglines be damned.
What was once "One True Champion" morphed into "We'll have two if there's two," which can also be translated into "Hey, committee, I've seen your surprisingly-open-to-interpretation guidelines and conference championship is near the top of the very short list, so, you sort it out because we aren't going to do it."
"I think 'One True Champion' is more about everyone playing everyone," Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said on Monday. "So that there is never a situation where your champion can be looked at and it's said, 'Gee, they may not have gotten there if they had to play everyone in the league.' ... We believe playing everyone every year is the right way to decide a champion, even if it ends up in a tie."
On Tuesday, TCU head coach Gary Patterson declined to take a stand on whether he prefers having a conference championship game. His teams have competed in five different conferences over the past two decades, so he has seen the benefits and the detriments.
But he too spent time lauding the idea of playing everyone in the conference over the course of the regular season, before adding: "We had our slip-up. We got beat by Baylor. Baylor had their slip-up. They got beat by West Virginia. Ohio State had their slip-up. They got beat by Virginia Tech. You can look at all that stuff a thousand ways. However you want to look at it. And like everybody does, you can go skew your stats however way you want to skew them to make everybody look better than the other two or three or four teams. So all you can do is just control what you have and do what you do. And for us, that's Iowa State."
His boss, TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte, added, "At the end of the day, this committee is very astute. They know college football. We've known from Day 1 that their evaluation would cover the entire body of work, from Game 1 until the last game."
You see what's happening here, right? This is all diplomacy of the mind, the sort of language you might teach to a political science class. Hopeful hypnosis disguised as football talk. And it certainly isn't exclusive to the folks in Fort Worth.
Baylor has (now famously) hired a PR firm to help bolster its case. Marshall, once a playoff-buster hopeful, had one most of the season. Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher just compared college football's new world to ice skating. Others have called it a beauty contest. SEC loyalists say their conference is being unfairly disrespected for playing FCS and non-Power 5 schools while FCS and non-Power 5 schools are complaining that the playoff is hurting their pocketbooks. Everyone else says the whole thing is rigged to help the SEC.
Meanwhile, the Big 12 lobbies for no one team. It is the only conference with two legit options and it knows it. So do its Power 5 partners.
With each step we take toward the possibility of the Big 12 putting two teams into a four-team playoff, the cries for an eight-team playoff grow louder. Sure, they've always existed. But these days, the voices are changing and they wear much nicer suits. The most recent eight-team suggestion came from ACC commissioner John Swofford -- and the first edition of the four-team model hasn't even been played yet.
"It reminds you so much of the days of the old bowl system," former Baylor coach Grant Teaff said earlier this year, just after the Bears' comeback win over TCU. "Back then, so many of us spent so much time lobbying and politicking for invitations to certain games. Or coaches would try to sway the poll voters when they might have won their bowl game and the other best team in the country had won theirs, but we couldn't play each other. All of that is how we ended up with the BCS. The numbers and the computers were going to do away with all that."
Oh yes, the Bowl Championship Series. With its pesky formula that totally worked. Most of the venom -- and there was plenty -- that the public held for the BCS system was based on the missteps of its first seven years, when the math was tinkered with repeatedly in an effort to close unforeseen loopholes. But after its last true debacle of 2003, the equation was tweaked one final time and over its final decade it's hard to argue that it failed to get the championship matchups right.
The people tired of the math. So the numbers were replaced by humans. A fact committee chair Jeff Long reminded us on Tuesday night. During his weekly media Q&A he repeatedly mentioned that fact. "They evaluate games, evaluate the competition. That's what this committee -- a human committee -- does."
Humanity means imperfection, argument, compromise and hurt feelings. A four-team playoff was always going to leave someone out. This year it might leave out two someones.
On Monday, Stephen Hawking issued a warning to the rest of us. Speaking at an event in London to reveal a new digital communications system, Earth's smartest man expressed a fear that our increasing dependence on rapidly developing artificial intelligence technology could spell doom for the human race.
I have good news, Steve. Here in the college football world we're good to go. The humans are fully in control.
For, now at least, the One True Champions.