While the Big 12 may eventually hold a football championship game, it won't be in 2015.
The conference has decided against implementing a championship game this year, despite contemplating a petition to the NCAA to allow it to do so.
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“I’m not sensing that’s where we’re headed,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said, via USA Today, following a meeting Tuesday with the league’s athletic directors.
Without a single champion last year, after TCU and Baylor tied for the league title, the Big 12 was left out of the inaugural College Football Playoff. Despite its name, the Big 12 has just 10 teams, and current rules state a conference must have 12 teams to hold a conference championship game. The Big 12 and the ACC have proposed new legislation to change the rules for 2016.
Despite reacting to a snub in the playoff last year, Bowlsby said "one year doesn't make a trend."
“There’s just a lot of things that could have happened,” TCU coach Gary Patterson said, per USA Today. “I think every year it changes when it comes to how you want to look at the situation."
Even if the Big 12 had held a championship game last year, there would have been no guarantee the winner would've gotten into the four-team playoff ahead of eventual national champion Ohio State from the Big Ten, an undefeated defending national champion in Florida State out of the ACC, SEC champion Alabama or Pac-12 champ Oregon.
Bowlsby did add that the Big 12 will continue to petition for deregulation of the NCAA rule governing conference championship games, but added, "you shouldn’t draw any conclusions from that."
“We felt we should keep it the way it is," Bowlsby said, "and that it shouldn’t be about who we played and who we didn’t play."