The Big 12 doesn't deserve a spot in the College Football Playoff
It had been trending this way for a bit, but it finally happened Saturday.
We can now declare it: Defense is dead in the Big 12.
There were some holdouts, but they couldn’t survive long enough to make it through the season. Defense in the Big 12 was 22 years old.
Defense in the Big 12 Conference is survived by sideline-to-sideline Air Raid offenses, poor tackling, weak defensive line play, 100-point totals, Kansas State, and a league that doesn’t deserve a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Credit to the Big 12 — they got the debate over if their conference champion should have a spot in the College Football Playoff out of the way in what seems to be record time.
Two of the league’s best shots at the playoff — Baylor and Texas — were embarrassed Saturday in the first block of games in Week 5.
Baylor allowed 465 yards and six touchdowns to an Iowa State team that lost to an FCS school earlier this year and had scored two touchdowns against Power Five teams on the campaign. Sure, the Bears won behind 17 unanswered fourth-quarter points, but the fact remains that they got into a shootout with Iowa State. That's not playoff material.
Texas, in year three of the Charlie Strong era, finally finished its metamorphosis into Texas Tech — though the Raiders probably could have put up more points on Oklahoma State, another high-flying offensive team that can’t stop anyone. The Longhorns allowed 555 yards in a 49-31 road loss to the Cowboys Saturday.
If that’s the best the Big 12 has to offer the College Football Playoff, then the selection committee isn’t going to be interested.
The Big 12’s only hope to make the CFP is that TCU — which abandoned the defense-first values that got the Horned Frogs invited into the league in 2011 — runs the table and projects something resembling competency in the coming weeks.
Or, in other words, the Big 12 doesn’t have a hope.
The College Football Playoff has four spots and has shown a desire to place four of the five major conference champions in the field, but this year is going to make that tough: Houston, out of the American Athletic Conference, appears to be a worthy playoff team, and the SEC, Big Ten, and ACC are all lopsided, where the three best teams in the league all reside in one of the leagues’ two divisions. Then there’s Washington out of the Pac-12.
This is a year where a Group of Five team could steal a spot and there is a high likelihood that a team that didn’t win its conference (or two of them) is among the four best teams in the nation.
Something has to give. Actually, a few things will probably have to give — but eliminating the Big 12 from playoff contention is an easy place to start. There isn’t an elite team in its ranks, and even those who win aren’t doing it in a way that stacks up against the rest of the nation.
It wasn’t always this way — while offense has long been the hallmark of the Big 12, there were teams that brought it on defense too. Baylor’s back-to-back conference champion teams weren’t known for defense, but comparatively to their current iteration, they were the 2001 Miami Hurricanes.
The best the Big 12 has to offer just isn’t good enough. The league doesn’t deserve a place in the playoff field this year.
The Big 12’s member teams have no problem conceding points, so surely they’ll have no problem with this one.
See ya! Iowa State came to play! https://t.co/A8wWQvZYvU
— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) October 1, 2016