While the many scenarios for which two teams would advance to the Big 12 football championship game provided exciting fodder for fans, it also shows that the league needs to institute divisions to eliminate the chaos and questions that popped up during November’s final days.
While the Colorado Buffaloes took care of business in a big way in a 52-0 shellacking of Oklahoma State in their final game on Friday afternoon, head coach Deion Sanders and his team had to wait until late Saturday night for Brigham Young to beat Houston to learn the team’s Big 12 title fate. A BYU win ultimately eliminated Colorado and had Deion Sanders Jr. questioning Houston’s effort level.
With that BYU win, Arizona State and Iowa State were cemented into the Big 12 title game, earning the tiebreaker over BYU and Colorado. Each of the four teams finished Big 12 play with a 7-2 record, but the Sun Devils and Cyclones each owned tiebreakers that pushed them into the championship.
For Colorado, not advancing was perhaps the bitterest pill of all to swallow. The Buffaloes did not play Iowa State, Arizona State or BYU this season, one of the issues that can happen when 16 teams make up the conference.
Sure, Colorado could have helped its own cause by avoiding a three-point home loss to Kansas State on October 12 or not fallen 37-21 in a neutral site loss (played in Kansas City) to Kansas. Those two division losses ultimately cost the Buffaloes a chance to put an exclamation point on a campaign where Colorado went 9-3 just one season after going 4-8 in 2023 as a member of the Pac-12. However, a division setup that would allow the winner of each division to advance to the championship game might have (because of proximity) assured Colorado played Brigham Young and/or Arizona State, helping settle the matter on the field rather than through tiebreakers.
In the first year of a larger Big 12 (16 teams) and Big 10 (18 teams), splitting into divisions makes sense from a geographic standpoint and a level-of-play standpoint. Having one of the 7-2 teams not face any of the other three 7-2 teams in the regular season was bad luck for the Big 12, but also brought a conference flaw into the spotlight.
And it wasn’t just Colorado that was in that situation as well. Iowa State also didn’t play Arizona State, Colorado or BYU in the regular season. BYU and Arizona State played each other in the next-to-last game of the regular season (a 28-23 win by the Sun Devils in Tempe), marking the only matchup between the conference’s top four teams.
Yes, the Big 12 Championship Game will pit two of the league’s top teams against each other. However, it’s also safe to wonder if it would have been the same matchup had divisions helped determine the game’s participants instead of tiebreakers.
