Who's going to win the Big 12?

The current playoff format all but guarantees a top 4 seed and first round bye to the winner of the Big 12 conference. Who's positioned to take over now Texas and Oklahoma are gone?

I carved out a nice and rather accurate lane here at America’s War Game during the major conference realignments when discussing what it would mean for the Big 12 and Pac-12 conferences. The Pac-12 had a legion of media allies, focused in the Left Coast newspapers and also the Athletic, whom would publish the numbers and propaganda the league was pumping out. The Big 12 had nowhere near the same media power but their various bloggers picked up the mantle in the often silly online wars about which conference would be poached.

Here at AWG I maintained four points which all bore out over time and I insisted upon them very early in the process.

1. The Pac-12 wasn’t culturally committed to football.

2. The Pac-12 was bigger and stronger than the Big 12 in terms of ratings, even without USC and UCLA.

3. The Big 12 would absorb the Pac-12 all the same because…

4. It was inevitable that the Big 10 would absorb Oregon and Washington while the Big 12 was a cohesive entity.

It was unquestionably a step down for Utah, the Arizonas, and Colorado to join up with the Big 12 after years of being in the Pac-12. Each of those schools has some potential within the new league, where most everyone is on a fairly level playing field and everyone is committed to making it work because they don’t have any other choice. However, the financial returns of the partnership will be less than they were in the Pac-12’s hey day.

All the principle forces of realignment were easy to see if you weren’t biased in one direction or another. The Pac-12 had superior ratings overall but were doomed by the fact their top brands were inevitably going to bail when they had the choice and the Big 10 was inevitably going to come calling to fill out the Pacific Time Zone schedule for their new members USC and UCLA.

So now we have a Big 12 that’s somewhere in between a Power 5 and Group of Five conference in terms of strength and resources coming together during a two-year stretch in which the top four seeds in the playoffs will be awarded to the four highest ranking conference champions. While the league is going to gradually decline in relevance, particularly once they head toward the inevitable 14-team model I predicted would be the outcome a day before it was announced that it was in consideration (again, logic can serve you better than sources at times), in the meantime they have a great opportunity to share the big stage.

The winner of the Big 12 is almost definitely going to secure the #4 seed, which will result in a first round bye before playing the winner of the #5 seed and #12 seed (Liberty probably). The #5 seed is going to be either a surging SEC/Big 10 team or Notre Dame so that’ll probably be the end of the Big 12 team in the playoffs. But you can’t really project the playoffs without trying to wade into the morass that is Big 12 title odds.

So, once more into the breach!