However, I do think a close OU win over Tech would mean Tech is not eliminated from the conversation. If OU beat Tech in a similar fashion to how Tech beat Texas then they would be substantially close to OU and Texas in the polls. And no I don’t think there’s some Grand Canyon sized gap between the OOC strength of Tech and Texas. And no I don’t think the Sooners had a murderers row in front of them either. All 3 teams had 4 easy wins for a legitimate top 10 team and all 3 teams got 4 wins. And don’t start with effing TCU and Cincinnati. Please. Those should be penciled in as “W”s for any team pretending to lay claim to the Big 12 championship. The first of the three of those teams to get up on their high horse about OOC schedule strength needs to get bitchslapped right back off.

As far as the suggestion of letting the top 2 teams play for the conference championship, there are a number of problems with this. Foremost, it would require a change in NCAA rules, not just Big 12 rules, because the whole reason we have these conference title games is because the SEC was smart enough to exploit an NCAA loophole that allowed far flung conferences with 12 teams to split into 2 divisions and play a CCG with each division champions – a rule that I believe existed for 1-aa teams, not initially inserted for major college football.

Secondly, I’d like to understand how much you guys would like that rule being applied in 2007 when both Missouri and Kansas sat 7-1 with the best league records entering the CCG and no south team would have qualified under a “take the top 2″ approach. Understanding that these teams just played a neutral site game the week before. That might have been considered a much worse result than what we are facing this year. So I don’t want to hear any bitching about the setup of the division champions playing unless you are prepared to make the claim that problems associated with applying that approach in 2007 wouldn’t have exceeded the benefits in 2008.

So no I don’t feel in the least bit sorry for any of the 3 teams. OU got lucky but lost so they deserved their division championship to have an asterisk. The conference almost rubber stamps everything Texas wants anyway so they should have had them rubber stamp changes to the tie breaking procedures before the season if they thought they were so much better. And Tech got owned in Norman so they aren’t even part of the equation in my mind. All 3 teams played pussy OOC’s. So all 3 deserve to have the result put up to a coin flip which you are basically doing with the absurdity of the BCS poll.

I’ve seen some Sooners offer the NFL tiebreaker system as a model for a new B12 tiebreaker. I don’t see a ton of difference between them, but one thing I do know, having followed NFL tiebreakers for several years:

When any step eliminates one team from a three-way tie, the tiebreaker immediately reverts to the two-way steps… the first of which is head to head.

[Once upon a time, I needed to contact the NFL office about the tiebreakers, and learned that this is done so suddenly that the step that culls a team is not even completed -- that is, they don't order the remaining teams under that step, to pick a winner, and be finished. They go back to the top of the appropriate list.]

The OU argument is that a team must be selected *only* from among the three. With no other losses by which to differentiate, the selection at least for some voters came down to an individual decision as to which team was “playing better.” (I actually don’t mind this — if I were voting, I would try to evaluate the season as a whole. But, I’d also be free to eliminate any team I chose, for whatever reason.)

But the NFL does it like the OB wants to look at it. They try to peel off pretenders and make it as simple as possible under the rules. The simplest of those, of course, is head to head.

And, as far as penalizing OU, it was the same voters who didn’t exactly roll over regarding head to head between Texas and OU (given the margins in the polls between UT and OU) who dropped Tech to the lower half of the top 10. (Remember, the computers still like Tech a lot.) The voters didn’t penalize OU for steamrolling Tech. They penalized *Tech.* It’s only a “penalty” to the Sooners if OU can’t win the argument without Tech.

The three way tie scenario is easy to address.

It’s simply about who played where?? Tech’s win was at home. OU’s win was at home. Texas’ win was at a neutral site.

Location of losses. Texas lost on the road close. Tech lost on the road big. OU lost at a neutral site by 10, scoring 14 of their 35 points over the last 40 minutes of play.

It’s as simple as that! If you can’t take Tech out of the equation, then you can’t take LOCATION out either. That, my friend, is why Texas would win the argument any way you look at it.

It seems to me that there is an argument Stoops could have used that doesn’t rely on throwing away the head-to-head results. He could have said that yes, Texas beat OU in October, but Tech beat Texas. Granted, it was in Lubbock, but that game (this could be Stoops talking) showed those teams were comparable at that time, and that OU blasting Tech shows how much OU has improved since then. He didn’t resort to that argument (its weakness is that it requires you to make a subjective assessment when there is contrary objective evidence) overtly because he didn’t have to. His paradox argument, where you throw the games out, worked well enough with voters who aren’t very good at reasoning. I wrote this post because I’m so tired of people throwing it out there, folding their arms, and saying, “sic is est, Jack”.

no it doesn’t. baylor, nebraska, their non-conference schedule, the tech ceiling, their ranking in every ranking system.

“In effect by taking Tech completely out of the picture because of the beatdown that OU layed on them, you are effectively penalizing OU for their superior performance against Tech.”
I’m curious to see one of the Barkers address this point. Because the entire UT head to head argument relies on OU’s massacre of Tech to eliminate Tech. If OU loses to Oklahoma State, then its the Red Raiders on their way to Lubbock regardless of the BCS rankings that would’ve rightfully listed Texas as the better team.

but if it did, we’d be the champions without an asterisk.