This year’s Big 12 race was one of the most bizarre in college football history.  Many pre-season favorites turned out to be various shades of putrid  How could a vaunted Oklahoma State team go 0-9 in the Bizarre (er, Big) 12?  Utah and Arizona were among other pre-season picks to excel.  Both excelled at being mediocre to awful!

The rest of the conference consisted of 13 pretty good teams with no teams deemed to be truly special.  On the last weekend, 6 teams had chances to play in the conference championship game.  4 teams finished with 7-2 conference marks.  Arizona State and Iowa State won tiebreakers over BYU and Colorado to play in the championship game.  Given the lack of parity in conference schedules, incomprehensible tiebreaks such as the conference winning percentage of opponents comes into play.

The Alamo Bowl proved to be the “alternate” Big 12 championship game when Colorado played Brigham Young.

The lack of being able to equitably decide who are the 2 most deserving teams to play for a  conference title is not just a Big 12 problem.  It is a universal issue with bloated numbers in each of the Power 4 conferences.  Consider that each Big 12 team does not play 6 conference members.  The issue is worse in the SEC since only 8 conference games are played, meaning that 7 conference rivals are not played.  The discrepancy in the difficulty of  certain schedules of 2024 SEC squads was laughable.  3 teams had brutal league slates:  Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma.  In comparision, the SEC schedules of Missouri and Texas were a walk in the park.

So, I was fine if the Alamo Bowl conferred a second Big 12 champion.  Turns out that the “two” Big 12 champs were picked 16th (Arizona State) and 13th (BYU) in the upside-down Big 12.  Gotta love the unpredictabilty and chaos!

Viva, the Big 12!!!