How do you know he meant the Big 12? Talk about attributions.
Normally I'd be inclined to side with your take. After all, sports media personalities are often on the air for hours on end, which means lots of time to make irrelevant, minor mistakes. But this isn't just mis-speaking or one mistake as you're trying to portray. He said that Maryland was in the ACC [mistake #1]. He said that WVU was in the Pac 12 [mistake #2]. And he then went on to say that this game outcome proved that the Pac 12 was better than the ACC instead of the Big 12 being better than the Big 10, which are the respective conferences that the two teams are actually in [mistake #3].
It's one thing to get a name wrong or mis-remember a fact here or there. That's totally understandable. It's another thing entirely to espouse completely flawed analysis based upon not understanding the facts. And clearly, Holtz forgot or didn't know the relevant facts underlying the topic at hand. He deserves criticism for that--we're talking about P5 here, not some development in the Sun Belt or Ivy League that few people are paying attention to anyway.
This wasn't just a slip of the lip [no pun intended, given his general mush-mouthedness] or getting a minor detail wrong--his entire analysis was flawed. Which is why he deserves criticism, as a college football studio "expert."
