Tiebreaker Rules Spoil Big 12 Season: Just Ask Brown

I sat down this afternoon in Eric Foner’s “The Radical Tradition in America” lecture and fumed. Laughing 10 seats to my right in the row before mine sat a little Land Thief, wearing his Oklahoma sweatshirt like a badge of honor after running up the score in almost every game this season.

I sat down this afternoon in Eric Foner’s “The Radical Tradition in America” lecture and fumed. Laughing 10 seats to my right in the row before mine sat a little Land Thief, wearing his Oklahoma sweatshirt like a badge of honor after running up the score in almost every game this season. I’m not bitter. Not in the least.

When fellow sports writer Max Puro shouted at me from the other side of the lecture hall that he was sorry and that I would just have to root for Missouri to win, the Sooner looked back at him and said, “That’s not going to happen.” He continued laughing.

I don’t respond well to Sooners even in the best of circumstances. I yelled, “45-35! Settled on a neutral field. I HATE YOU!” No joke, I really screamed that two minutes before Foner started his lecture.
My hate of Oklahoma is well documented in this sports section, and my editor probably wants to shake me and say, “Stop writing about Texas and Oklahoma.”

But you see, I just can’t. The number .013 resounds in my head over and over again. I tried, I honestly tried, to think of something else to write this column about. But it’s like my mind is the plane Texas fans hired to fly over Stillwater on Saturday, circling above the ESPN GameDay crew for the entire day. I can’t stop thinking about it.
If you’re not familiar with the biggest story in college football this season, the Big 12 South Division, which at one point had four of its six teams in the top 10, finished in a three-way tie between Texas, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma. It got sticky because the three teams beat each other: Texas beat Oklahoma by 10 on a neutral field, Texas Tech beat Texas by six in the final second at home, and Oklahoma beat Texas Tech by 40 at home.

And so, the Big 12 had to go down to its fifth tiebreaker, which says if three teams are tied for the division and their losses are of the round robin variety, the one ranked highest in the second to last Bowl Championship Series poll will go to the conference championship game.

As anyone can guess, at this moment, I’m not a big fan of tiebreakers. Actually, if you were to ask me about tiebreakers, I might very well break your finger off. That’s how much I dislike tiebreakers.

They remind me of that saying: “Fair isn’t everyone getting an equal share, but everyone getting what they want.” Except in terms of college football, getting what you want is more difficult than breaking into Disney World. Point zero one three. That tiny, miniscule difference decided everything. Head-to-head be damned.

Brown coach Phil Estes feels my pain, as his Brown Bears share the Ivy Championship with Harvard despite the fact that Brown won the head-to-head battle. Because the Ivy League actually doesn’t have a tiebreak system, the Bears have to share a ring with the team they knocked 24-22 in the second game of the season. So perhaps tiebreakers aren’t at the root of the problem, but rather the system of college football.

The system that maintains that every game counts, but maybe the ones at the end of the season count a little more. Don’t question, it’s all very complicated. Our computers will figure it out. No, they’re not subjective like the human polls, they just honestly evaluate everything. Okay, well, the computers actually don’t watch the games and nerds just enter numbers in equations and the computers spit numbers back out. But it’s legit, I swear. And at least we don’t just have actual people having the final say in ranking teams anymore.

Now, the way to avoid all of this mess is simple: don’t lose. But what college football really means is: don’t lose, but if you have to, lose early in the season. Oh, and especially make sure that you score enough points after the fact that no one really remembers and the computers love your numbers.

Because apparently Florida’s home loss to an unranked team in the fourth game of the season—to a quarterback who transferred from Texas because he was the backup behind Colt McCoy—is a better loss to some human pollsters than losing to the #7 team on the road in the final second. Final second, not seconds. Literally, one second left. But it’s okay. I’m fine. Seriously.

Now, I’m not one to propose a college playoff system, mainly because I think it would further decrease the importance of every game in college football. Would it be nice to try and objectively figure out who is the best team in college football by making the top eight all play each other? Yeah, but you still have the problem of ranking the top eight. What I’m proposing is that the Big 12 needs to change its tiebreak rules—which they are already talking about doing, after this national debacle. But it’s too little too late for this Longhorn fan.

If I have to hold back tears one second and stop myself from ranting and raving the next, well, that’s perfectly normal. I’m gearing up to cheer on Chase Daniel—who, if he had just led his team to a victory against Kansas on Saturday, might have given Texas the computer boost it needed. No hard feelings, Chase.

And if Chase fails, well, I hope Oklahoma gets embarrassed on the national stage for the fifth time and Big Game Bob chokes again. It will help ease the ache just a little.

Because it sure made me feel better when the Sooner said my team should gear up to play Utah in the Fiesta Bowl and I responded, “Yeah, you would know, losing to Boise State. Ouch, that was embarrassing.”

Holly MacDonald is a Barnard College junior majoring in English and history.

Tags: Sports, Holly MacDonald