FORT COLLINS — The College Football Playoff selection committee found a way Sunday, in effect, to avoid having to pick between once-beaten Texas Christian and Baylor of the Big 12 for the four-team semifinal field.
It picked neither. The Big 12 was shut out.
So the debate over whether Baylor’s win over the Horned Frogs should serve as the deciding factor in slotting the two teams, or whether TCU’s body of work was more impressive and mattered more, became moot.
Because Jeff Long, the Arkansas athletic director who serves as the CFP committee chairman, made it clear that Ohio State’s Big Ten championship game romp over Wisconsin not only was eye-opening, it added a 13th game to the case.
That reopened calls for the Big 12, which has 10 teams, to expand — to 12 — and add a conference championship game. Around here, especially in the wake of Friday’s decision by the Colorado State University system’s board of governors to forge on with the on-campus stadium project, the “pick us, pick us!” hands in air again came from the Rams’ constituency.
I learned a long time ago to never say never.
But if the Big 12 expands, many other schools are ahead in line. If CSU bases anything it does on the premise that it helps it get into the Big 12, that’s delusional and irresponsible. To the CSU administration’s credit, the stadium campaign featured no grandiose claims about that.
One school in line ahead of CSU is Cincinnati, where the irony is that athletic director Mike Bohn was hired with the mandate to help get the Bearcats into the Big 12 — the league he helped Colorado leave in favor of the Pac-12.
Other contenders to land in the Big 12 include Memphis, Central Florida, Houston, Brigham Young, Marshall and even Boise State.
If CSU gets into a power league, its revenues will skyrocket, thanks to television, and there’s no doubt if the thought is that it would bring the Denver television market into the fold, that could help. One of the many “achievement” clauses in Jim McElwain’s now-moot contract was if the Rams joined a power conference and met a certain revenue threshold, his base salary immediately jumped to $3 million. (That’s a little oversimplified, but it will do for illustration purposes.)
Of course, though, the Rams then would have to play by the big-boy rules about to be decided and implemented through power-league autonomy.
But yes, whether it’s CSU or anyone else, adding two teams now seems to make sense for the Big 12. For a while, it seemed that not having a championship game would help a league in the CFP picture and add to the chances of a league getting more than one team in the final four. It seemed that championship games might even be endangered. Now, it’s obvious that they are not.
The obvious potential sticking point in the new system all along was that there are only four semifinal spots and five power leagues. So, regardless, at least one league was going to be bypassed, and maybe more if independent Notre Dame claimed a spot or if the SEC’s ability to enchant the committee led to two teams from that league making the field.
Whichever league was shut out, the squealing was going to be high-pitched and high-decibel. And now that the CFP has messed with Texas …
Terry Frei: tfrei@ denverpost. com or TFrei
