Why is the Big 12 not competing for football national titles anymore?

Tonight the college football world will crown another champion and once again the Big 12 will not be at the party. For a conference as highly regarded as the Big 12 to have had such little participation in national championship games as it has is unacceptable.

Since the formation of the conference in 1996, only two national championship football titles have gone to Big 12 teams. In 2000, Oklahoma made an improbable run from unranked in the preseason to winning the title and in 2005 Vince Young led the Texas Longhorns to glory.

But since that night in the Rose Bowl when Young scrambled into the end zone with under a minute to play, the Big 12 has not won a football championship. In fact, in the 11 years since that game, the conference has only played in the national championship game only twice.

Overall, the conference has only had seven teams play for the national title (and one of those programs, Nebraska, is now a Big 10 team meaning that among current conference members there have only been 6 title game appearances). Meanwhile, the SEC has had 12 teams play in the championship game and the current members of the ACC have had 8.

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Yes, the Big 12 has more championship game appearances than the Pac 12 and the Big 10. But since 2010, the Big 12 is the only one of the five major conferences that has not played for the national title.

So why has the Big 12 become an afterthought when it comes to the highest levels of the game? The reasons are plenty and almost all of them can be traced back to 2010.

There is no coincidence in the fact that the last time the Big 12 played in the championship game is the year before the chaos of college football conference realignment shook the NCAA in 2010. After all the maneuvering, posturing and back room deals were over the Big 12 was left as the clear loser.

Not only had the SEC, ACC, Pac 12 and Big 10 all added valuable members but the Big 12 had lost four of its charter members (Missouri, Texas A&M, Colorado and Nebraska). Scrambling, the conference was able to add two teams but with 10 teams the Big 12 lost the right according to NCAA rules to have a conference championship game.

Since 2011, the Big 12 has played the round-robin schedule with each team playing every other conference member. That style of deciding a champion went out of style in the 1990’s.

So in an era when college football has progressed and grown in every way, the Big 12 was forced to go back in time to reuse an antiquated method as a way to presenting itself. Gone is the nationally televised championship game on the season’s last weekend in which the other four conferences are able to showcase their two best teams and make one final statement to the selection committee about why conference deserves to be represented in the national title matchup.

Last season, most experts agree that the lack of a conference title game kept the Big 12 out of the first ever NCAA Playoff. When TCU and Baylor tied for the top spot in the conference, the Big 12 idiotically refused to name one of the teams its champion (despite the fact that Baylor won the head-to-head matchup). The lack of foresight by the conference administrators who failed to have a tiebreaker of any kind and the absence of a conference title game in cost the league on the field and in reputation.

And yet, the conference is content to refrain from attempting to add two more schools to get to 12 teams or petitioning the NCAA for the right to have a title game. So still the conference walks the fine line of letting the other conferences represent themselves at their best on the season’s final weekend while the Big 12 counters with scintillating matchups such as West Virginia vs. Kansas State.

But that is not the only reason the conference has fallen out of the national spotlight. The blue-blood programs in the conference have failed to excel like those in the other conferences.

Like it or not, the world of college football is about tradition and branding. The national title club is an exclusive group that the establishment is not keen on expanding at a rapid pace.

Last season, if the two teams tied for the conference title were Texas and Oklahoma, it is far more likely that one of them would have been invited to the party. But in the last five years, Texas has gone 33-35 and Oklahoma has not finished ranked higher than 6^th in the final polls.

In the meantime, traditional powers like Ohio State, Alabama, Florida State, Norte Dame and others have reasserted their place among the nation’s elite. But, the Big 12 banner has been carried by Baylor, TCU and Oklahoma State, none of which are members of the game’s ruling class and each carries less respect in the minds of the college football’s selection committee.

Another theory about the struggles of the Big 12 on a national stage revolves around the style of play in the conference. Many suggest that the pass-heavy spread offensive attacks that dominate the conference have led to a lack of physicality throughout the league.

Some feel that the spread offense is a gimmicky way for teams on the second tier of college football’s hierarchy to makeup distance in the talent gap but at the most elite levels, teams that are physical all season can exert their will against the spread. In fact, no spread passing team has won a national title in well over two decades (in 2010, Auburn ran the spread offense but its version was a run-heavy version of the scheme).

This year, the Big 12 champion OU Sooners were in the college football playoff but were embarrassed in the semi-finals by Clemson, which physically dominated the game. It was clear that the talent along the line of scrimmage was severely skewed in the Tigers’ favor which says quite a bit about the Big 12 since Oklahoma was by far the most physical team in the league.

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So once again, the conference will be nothing but a bystander when tonight’s champion is crowned leaving the fans of the conference to wonder why their league is no longer elite and what, if anything, the powers that be are going to do to change that reality.

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