By: Burke De Boer Sports Editor
Big 12 expansion talks flared up and died down in reliable fashion again this year.
Next year the conference plans to add a conference title game.They are willing to do so with their current ten-team structure, rather than upping their number of affiliated schools to 12 or 14.
The concept of a title game came as a way to help Big 12 schools compete with other powerful conferences to get spot in the College Football Playoff. Ten teams might seem too small to demand a championship game, so schools looking to better their own ranking profiles tried to seize an opportunity to climb the conference ladder.
At the start of September this year, ESPN reported that BYU, Cincinn
ati, Houston and South Florida lead the dozen candidates. Houston and BYU in particular seemed to be increasingly viable as the time ticked towards announcement.
Bob Bowlsby is the commissioner of the Big 12, and he and his board of directors reportedly never discussed specific teams when they voted on the option of expansion.
Until the 1990s, the conference was known as the Big 8. Adding four powerful Texas schools increased its profile immensely. But in recent years, Texas A&M left for the Southeastern Conference and Nebraska left for the B1G, taking all their rankings value with them. These are only two of the moves that were made in a rash of re-conferencing through the early 2010s. And the Big 12 isn’t out of the woods yet.
The conference plans to announce within the next month whether or not they will split their conference into two divisions. This would help determine which teams play in the championship, in the style of the Pac-12 north and south or the Southeastern Conference west and east.
Contact the author at journalsports@wou.edu
