Big 12 tiebreaker chaos more proof of college football's dysfunction | Williams
We're days away from the end of the Big 12 regular-season football schedule and not much closer to knowing how it shakes out than we were in August.
Shehan Jeyarajah, the national college football reporter at CBS Sports, quoted a Big 12 official on Monday saying there are 128 possible outcomes and seven teams still with a mathematical chance to make the conference championship game.
What a mess. Not a glorious mess. Not a beautiful mess. An embarrassing mess.
Brett Yormark's people in charge at the Big 12 are having to reexamine and make up tiebreaker rules as they go.
More evidence that the people who run college football at the FBS level keep doing it major damage. In this year's 14-team version of the Big 12, teams play nine conference opponents and miss four. Texas Tech football doesn't play Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Iowa State and Cincinnati.
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You might think it's wonderful that, going into the final week of the regular season, chaos is the order of the day. You'd be fooling yourself.
Whichever team ends up winning on Dec. 2 in Arlington will have a dubious claim to the championship. No. 7 Texas, the only Big 12 team with one conference loss, has the inside track. Who's to say Oklahoma State or West Virginia might not have tripped up the Longhorns, the way OSU did each of the previous two years and the way WVU did two years ago? We don't know. They didn't play those teams.
Iowa State's 6-5 this season, 5-3 in the Big 12 and in the top half of the conference. ISU got stuck playing Texas, Oklahoma and resurgent Kansas on this year's schedule. Too bad, Cyclones. With a better draw from the conference office, you'd be more firmly in contention.
It's this way everywhere in the power-five. Everyone knows that multiple conference opponents not playing each other in any given year is no way to decide a legitimate championship. Profiles in courage are in short supply, though, as long as big television dollars keep rolling in.
This sort of thing never happened in the Southwest Conference. It didn't happen in recent years in the 10-team Big 12. Everybody played everybody. Breaking ties was easy. Just check the head-to-head outcome. Now it would take random luck to have a head-to-head result against all the other contending teams.
The people who run college football have lost their heads.
In this atmosphere, it's worth pointing out a few exceptions. Washington's one of the schools that helped implode the Pac-12 Conference with its geographically nonsensical move to the Big Ten upcoming, so we're hesitant to credit the UW for much.
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On Monday, however, Washington and Washington State announced they have a five-year agreement in principle to keep alive the Apple Cup through 2028.
UW president Ana Mari Cause had this to say: "The Apple Cup tradition is beloved by Huskies, Cougars and football fans across Washington and beyond, so one of my priorities has been to ensure that it continues into this new era. ...This is a win for our fans, our universities and the state of Washington."
How hard was that?
Take note, Texas and Texas A&M. We've documented that Georgia-Georgia Tech, South Carolina-Clemson, Florida State-Florida and Kentucky-Louisville all are playing longstanding rivalry games this week, though they've all been non-conference matchups forever. Next year, we can add Washington-Washington State to the list.
Not Bedlam, though, and not Texas A&M-Texas Tech or Texas Tech-Texas. This week Tech-UT game is the last for the foreseeable future. Over the next decade, the Red Raiders' marquee non-conference games will come against Oregon, Oregon State, North Carolina State, Mississippi State and Arkansas.
"You're losing some really good in-state rival games through all this movement," Tech coach Joey McGuire said on Monday, "and so I'm hopeful at some point in time that you could bring those games back.
"I'd love to play A&M again. ... You've got great games like that, why go somewhere else and play whenever you can play Texas or play Texas A&M?
"There's no reason to travel to Oregon and have a game like that where you could have it right here in your own state and have two really strong fan bases get to watch really good football."
In a logical college football world, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
In a logical college football world, we wouldn't have 128 possible outcomes with seven teams still in contention for the Big 12 championship game.
College football
Who: Texas Tech at Texas
When: 6:30 p.m. Friday
Where: Royal-Memorial Stadium, Austin
Records: Texas Tech 6-5, 5-3 in the Big 12; Texas 10-1, 7-1
Rankings (CFP/AP/USA TODAY AFCA coaches poll): Texas 7/7/7; Texas Tech unranked
TV: ABC
Line: Texas by 13
Last game: Texas Tech 24, Central Florida 23; Texas 26, Iowa State 16
Last meeting: Texas Tech 37, Texas 34 (OT) last year in Lubbock.
Fast fact: Texas Tech and Texas are playing for the 64th year in a row dating to 1960, the Red Raiders' first year of football competition in the Southwest Conference.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Big 12 tiebreaker chaos more proof of sport's dysfunction | Williams
