No Big XII Championship Game: Is It Smart?

The Big XII was ultimately left out of the College Football Playoff last season due to the fact that they didn't claim a true champion. Bill Hancock, executive director of the College Football Playoff, took to the podium today at Big XII Media Days to explain that their decision to not have a championship game was smart.

Hancock, the former executive director of the Bowl Championship Series, spoke with the media and said that "one year doesn't make a trend," and conferences should consider the risk of playing an extra game. There is a chance for the top team in the conference to lose their championship game and get knocked out of contention for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

However, college football is a sport of subjective risk. If you don't play a "tough" schedule and lose no games or just one game, it has the ability to hurt you in the grand scheme of things (e.g. Boise State throughout the mid 2000s). Key injuries can affect a team's chances of either making or missing the College Football Playoff. And conference championships won are also considered.

That last point is critical.

That last point shouldn't be subjective. It should be objective and solidly conclusive. It should be a clearly defined criteria, and the Big XII should have learned that lesson from last season. Baylor won the Big XII title by defeating TCU in head-to-head competition, but the conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby declared that the title would be split between the two since TCU finished the regular season ranked higher than the Bears.

After noticing that the Big XII was left out of the first annual College Football Playoff, Bowlsby said that not having a conference championship game penalized the conference, stating that "it would have been nice to know that ahead of time."

One conference rule that is basically uniform across college football is that conferences with less than 12 teams cannot have a conference championship. Either the Big XII will find a way to change the rule for the conference (especially with each conference gaining autonomy from the NCAA earlier this year), or they will expand from 10 current teams to a total surpassing 12, to create two divisions within the conference and yet again have a conference championship game.

I'm of the opinion that conferences don't need a conference championship game, but human beings are intrinsically biased, and human beings are the ones selecting the four teams for the College Football Playoff. One of the biggest biases of people in general is the Party Effect or "recency bias;" or in laymen's terms, "What have you done for me lately?" We tend to take what has happened more recently and place added weight to said happening.

Is that fair? No, not really. And that's the case for a conference championship game. The playoff committee, whether they say this or not, is more prone to place added weight to a championship game than a big match-up in Week 3 of the regular season. If a team wins 12 games and loses only 1 instead of winning 11 and losing 1, it only appears that the record with 12 wins is a better record than 11 wins.

With that being said, since bias is a discernible problem when dealing with human beings, having a conference championship, although not important in dealing with how good teams really are, is the most practical way for people to differentiate which teams should play against which teams when it comes to postseason play.

Of course, if/when that criteria becomes too important and two or three hopeful playoff teams lose in their conference championship games, we'll all complain that it is a detriment to honoring the integrity of crowning one true college football champion.

And at that point, if the Big XII still doesn't have a championship game, they'll look like geniuses.

This topic is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the process of setting up the playoff should be honest and fair, with all teams playing by the same rules. On the other hand however, each conference has autonomy and can govern themselves how they best see fit. If the Big XII doesn't want a conference championship game, they don't have to have one, but they will clamor that the selection committee place as much weight on winning a round robin conference championship as they do a single conference championship game. Inversely, the other conferences will raise a brouhaha about it not being fair that they have to play an extra game more than the Big XII, should a Big XII team actually make the College Football Playoff.

Personally, I would have liked to see TCU or Baylor in the playoff last season, but then the eventual national champion Ohio State Buckeyes would not have rightfully won the trophy.

No one is a winner, but everyone is a winner. An interesting dichotomy of give and take. We'll see how it plays out off the field.

On the field, just don't lose... Well, that's much easier said than done.