Big 12 ready to approve football tiebreakers, declare ‘One True Champion’

The Big 12 Conference is about to put its “One True Champion” slogan into action.

The league is ready to stop declaring co-champions in football and to start using tiebreakers in the event of a first-place tie, commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Thursday.

“We haven’t taken a formal action on it,” Bowlsby said, “but that is the direction we are headed.”

Speaking after a three-hour meeting with the league’s athletic directors at the Sheraton Crown Center, Bowlsby told a small group of reporters that head-to-head results will be used in future seasons to determine an outright football champion if two teams sit atop the standings with identical conference records. The conference is also working on a three-way tiebreaker that will be chosen next month.

The decision comes four months after Baylor and TCU were declared football co-champions. Both teams lost one game and were ranked in the top 10, but many argued that the Bears should have been declared outright champions based on a home victory over the Horned Frogs. But it was TCU that spent most of the season ranked highest in the national polls.

Both teams were in contention for a spot in college football’s inaugural four-team playoff. Both missed out. The Big 12 presented both teams as champions to the College Football Playoff selection committee, and Ohio State leapfrogged them with a blowout victory in the Big Ten championship game.

Perhaps the label of outright champion would have buoyed Baylor’s chances.

“It would have helped one of our teams,” Bowlsby said. “Part of their portfolio is they would have been the champion. Would it have made a difference? Everyone I have talked to on that committee said no, because they were impressed enough by Ohio State on the last day of the season and that would have carried the day. Who knows?”

The Big 12 will continue to honor split champions and award multiple trophies in other sports, Bowlsby said.

Bowlsby and the conference’s athletic directors also spent one hour on the topic of court-storming. Kansas State fans rushing the floor at Bramlage Coliseum following a February victory over rival Kansas made national news when KU coach Bill Self and K-State coach Bruce Weber were pinned against the scorer’s table and a fan bumped Jamari Traylor.

K-State apologized to Kansas for not properly controlling the crowd and the Big 12 publicly reprimanded the Wildcats for poor security protocol.

K-State athletic director John Currie told The Star he was against court-storming the following day, and that he was willing to do anything necessary to create a safer alternative or eliminate the practice. He said he was in favor of following the Southeastern Conference’s lead and fine teams that allow court-storming.

The Big 12 isn’t ready to go that far, Bowlsby said, but it is exploring options.

“We are going to put a committee together that is going to work on it and come back to us with some recommendations,” Bowlsby said. “We didn’t take the step where we are going to implement a fine structure or have a hard-and-fast policy or if we are going to leave it that schools have the responsibility to get teams and officials off the court.”

Another key talking point was the possibility of freshmen eligibility.

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany has said he wants to consider making freshmen ineligible in football and men’s basketball the way they were before 1972. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott has also expressed support for exploring the idea.

Bowlsby thinks it is worth considering.

“We ought to have a robust discussion around it,” Bowlsby said. “There are too many young people who come with neither the academic ability to take advantage of a college education or the desire to take advantage of a college education.

“I think there ought to be legitimate alternatives. I don’t think there is any question that academically and socially, time-management wise, a year of readiness would be a real good thing.”

But it could also increase scholarships and water down a talent pool that some say is already down in college basketball.

“It costs real money to have additional kids on scholarship,” Bowlsby said. “And there are very significant competitive issues … There is a very significant trickle down. It is not without its negative implications. I just think it is a very good time to have the discussion.”

This story was originally published March 12, 2015 at 11:57 AM with the headline "Big 12 ready to approve football tiebreakers, declare ‘One True Champion’."