Let’s see how this new Big 12 slogan backfires this time
The conference that’s tried so hard to avoid getting shut out of the Playoff is now bragging about making it so hard to get into the Playoff.
Here, the Big 12 is bragging about a thing it tried to avoid:
Look at this conference media days brain blast:
They’re not wrong, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing... #Big12MediaDays pic.twitter.com/oMvDBxJSFl
— LandGrant Gauntlet (@the_LGG) July 16, 2018
The Big 12 missed the first ever College Football Playoff in 2014, when Ohio State leapfrogged Baylor in the final week and left the Bears and TCU just outside the glass.
Since 2014, the conference has obsessed about how to avoid getting shut out of the sport’s biggest event.
For a few years, it scheduled most of its anticipated marquee games close to the end of the season, trying to create conference championship-ish games despite not having a real title game. Then, starting in 2017, it put in a championship game despite being a 10-team league with no divisions, where everyone plays everyone in the regular season.
So the Big 12 now requires its champion to play its second best team twice, creating more opportunities for the regular-season champ to add a loss and miss the Playoff. It didn’t keep the league out in ‘17, because Oklahoma (which would’ve made the Playoff on the strength of an 11-1 regular season anyway) drubbed TCU in the championship game in Arlington. But the old Big 12 title game cost the league plenty of title shots. Sometime, this one will too.
The 2017 game still hurt, by the way, by keeping the Frogs out of another New Year’s Six bowl. In turn, it cost the Big 12 something like $3 million in bowl money.
On another hand, the round robin means everyone in the Big 12 gets to play Kansas every season.
So maybe it’s not the hardest path to the Playoff after all.
At any rate, this slogan appears primed to add to the recent Big 12 tradition of offseason marketing campaigns backfiring.
This could be the second installment of the Playoff era.
The first was the time the Big 12 advertised around having “One True Champion” before, in 2014, deciding it could in fact have two true champions.