Goal of Big 12 Conference remains the same, commissioner says
Commissioner Bob Bowlsby of the Big 12 Conference began his state of the conference address by noting his league was the only one in the country to have a representative in the College Football Playoffs, the men’s basketball Final Four, College World Series, and the women’s College World Series.
He noted the Texas had every team that wears the burnt orange make the postseason and that Oklahoma had three first-round draft picks in Baker Mayfield (NFL), Kyler Murray (MLB) and Trae Young (NBA).
Bowlsby welcomed new athletics directors Jeremiah Donati to TCU and Jeff Long to Kansas, noting that with Long’s hire, the conference now has the first four years of the College Football Playoff chairman in the league.
While all of those accomplishments are tremendous, Bowlsby noted the gathered crowd wanted to talk football. So he threw out a statistic that may catch fans by surprise. The Big 12 has the No. 1 non-conference schedule in football with 37 percent of its games played against Power 5 opponents.
“That’s the highest by quite a distance compared to the rest of the Power 5,” he said. “Eighty percent of our teams were in the postseason last year, and we posted a 5-3 record, which is pretty good especially when you consider we’ve been 65 percent winning percentage over the last two years combined.”
The commissioner said he believes the College Football Playoffs, with its four teams, is in pretty good shape. He thought the Oklahoma-Georgia national semifinal game was the best he had watched, and that the committee was charged with three tasks: keeping the postseason strong, keeping October and November as the best regular season in all of sports, and wanting to strengthen September.
“I feel like we’ve accomplished all those things, so I think we have to be a little bit careful moving away from it,” he said. “I don’t sense any significant movement to move away from four, but I expect that those discussions will be ongoing.”
Bowlsby said the conversation about the playoffs has been about how much value the committee should give to conference championships. He noted that 13 honest people go into a room and pick the best four teams by looking at a lot of criteria that is weighted differently “depending on whose vantage point you have.”
“I don’t think that we are in a situation where we want to get too prescriptive on that,” he said. “This was the first time that we had two teams from the same league and there were reasons why it happened. There were also plenty of reasons to disagree with the decision.”
The commissioner agreed that those involved with the playoffs want “objective criteria,” but there’s subjective argument. One is to make every conference play the same number of conference games, which Bowlsby said he is an advocate. The hurdle is that some conferences have 12 members, while others have 14. The other part, he noted, is that people should see the opponents on a team’s schedule and study them to find out when a squad got hot. Was it towards the end of the regular season or at the beginning? But Bowlsby noted all he can do, just like most, is state their beliefs but have no say on what another conference chooses to do.
Meanwhile, he made it clear what his conference wants to do every year in every sport.
“To reiterate, we aspire to win national championships and we’ll keep working at it until we do that,” Bowlsby said.
While the Big 12 Conference is known for what it does on the playing field, the commissioner noted the league armed 75 of its football players with the chance to make a $1,000 grant to a teacher that they had identified. During the women’s basketball tournament, the league also recognized 30 teachers in the Oklahoma City area with $1,000 grants under the “My Teacher My Hero” program.
