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Patterson: 'Let's do' Big 12 title game if it helps with CFP committee
If the College Football Playoff selection committee is going to view teams that play in a conference championship game more favorably, than TCU Horned Frogs coach Gary Patterson says bring it on.
The Horned Frogs, you might recall, were ranked No. 3 in the penultimate playoff rankings. Then they popped Iowa State, 55-3, to seemingly solidify their place in the inaugural four-team playoff bracket. Only, after TCU did its thing, Ohio State walloped Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game, and the committee used the impressive prime-time performance to bump the Frogs out and put the Buckeyes in.
Had TCU also played and won a conference championship game, would it, and not the eventual national champions, have been awarded the fourth and final spot?
Well, we'll never know. However, it might soon become possible for the 10-team Big 12 to schedule a championship game if the rules calling for a minimum of 12 conference members are relaxed, as recently reported.
"I still don’t understand why it's needed if you have a committee picking the four best teams," Patterson said of a conference title game during Tuesday's Big 12 teleconference. "If it’s that important for the conference, then yeah, let’s do it."
The only issue is that just as a conference championship game can giveth, it can also taketh away as the Big 12 has found it before when its previous championship games produced an upset winner and kept one of its teams out of the national championship game.
But again, if the perception of playing a championship game resonates with the committee, then the Big 12's action must be to do what Patterson says, "let's do it."
