“The Big 12 conference continues to take the lead in the area of player safety as the first conference to enact more restrictive contact polices than now permitted”, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in a release.
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Bowlsby added that most Big 12 presidents like the current number of 10, which has been in place since TCU and West Virginia joined the conference in 2012 to replace Texas A&M and Missouri.
When reminded about Oklahoma’s president David Boren declaring in June that the Big 12 conference is disadvantaged in the new playoff system without 12 teams, Bowlsby disagreed.
The NCAA restricts teams to three days of contact per week. “We spend at least a little time in every meeting talking about it. But until that majority shifts, it’s a purely academic conversation”.
“I thought that the whole thing about going to a playoff was that they pick the best four teams and you didn’t have to play a championship game”, Patterson said in his press conference.
“We are choosing to manage it rather than prohibit it, ” Bowlsby said. “We think that full round-robin is the right way to determine it”.
“We have a pretty good template for doing it”, he said. “There is no reason we can’t be competitive in all of those games”.
“I think it’s because we are different”.
We could see fresher bodies come the end of November because they haven’t been beating each other up all week in practice.
With that in mind, Bowlsby admitted that the Big 12 would likely have to reassess its plans if the conference is shut out of the College Football Playoff once again. Having said that, there isn’t any question that the nonconference schedule of each of our institutions affects the strength of each of the other members of our league.
Bowlsby said that the conference hasn’t had any talks about the issue, but he thinks “it’s something that we’ll talk about”. Others could be persuaded to change their minds, Bowlsby said.
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The Big 12 has gone one step beyond, creating a limit of two contact days – defined as tackling to the ground and helmet-to-helmet contact – with one during the week and one as game day.
