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Message: [QUOTE="Scooch, post: 1380753, member: 628"] The Big 12 met with the College Football Playoff honchos yesterday and found out that, shocker, it'd be better for them to have a conference championship game: [URL]http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/12789694/big-12-likely-add-championship-game-commissioner-bob-bowlsby-says[/URL] So who will be the Big 12's 11th and 12th teams you ask? Since a league needs 12 teams to hold a conference championship game. Oh, that won't be necessary, as it is expected that "[I]a proposal to deregulate conference championship games, removing the 12-team requirement, is set to be implemented for the 2016 season.[/I]" Sorry Cincinnati and BYU, guess you're out of luck. Let's all get in the way-back machine and travel to 1990, when the SEC was in talks with South Carolina to expand to 11 teams. The SEC also wanted to hold a conference championship game, but the NCAA told them they needed 12 teams to do that. See, there was a rule the NCAA first devised for Division 3 schools that required a conference to have 12 teams to hold a conference championship, and in their infinite wisdom they decided that rule had to be applied to Division 1 as well. So, the SEC went and invited Arkansas to be their 12th team, which was a death blow to the faultering SWC (along with much of their membership being involved in outrageous scandals). The dissolution of the SWC caused Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor (thanks Ann Richards!) to merge with the Big 8 to form the Big 12, a number of teams now codified as magical by the NCAA. Much of the conference realignment that has occurred ever since has been driven, in large degree, by conferences wanting to hit that magical 12-school membership in order to hold a lucrative conference championship game. And now, after 20+ years of at times excrutiating machinations, it looks like the NCAA is going to relent and let conferences play a conference championship game with however many number of schools it wants. Which is a decision they could have, and should have made, in 19-freakin'-90 to begin with. Unbelievable. [/QUOTE]

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