Big 12 limiting football contact to two days per week

The Big 12 is introducing a conference-wide policy that will limit its football programs to two “live contact opportunities” per week, conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby announced Monday as the league convened its football media days.

“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”, Bowlsby said.

Bowlsby offered no specifics, but said a majority of Big 12 chief executives – the final deciders on expansion – are happy with 10 members. “Even if it doesn’t, we think that that’s the right way to conduct our practices”. They’re doing a lot of good things in trying to monitor players and limit the amount of contact they get, especially to the head.

Bowlsby joked that if the next five years of technological leaps match the previous five, “we might be watching the Super Bowl on the inside of our eyelids”. “We were very close to having two teams in (the playoffs) past year, and you really don’t have to have much of an imagination to see how that might have worked out where we would have gotten one, and maybe two without too much of a stretch”.

While Bowlsby expects future deregulation to allow the possibility of a championship game, he believes the round-robin schedule is still the best way to determine the league champion.

“We have to recruit better. There is no reason we can’t be competitive in all of those games”.

Bowlsby said in his introductory comments that small groups of conference presidents favor expansion and others are against it. Those left include “four or five in the middle” who Bowlsby said could be persuadable about adding new teams.

“We believe it’s the right step”, he told the media on Monday, “And we hope it will become the national rule”.

“I think it’s because we are different”. “I could capably argue either side of it from a mandatory standpoint because I think coaches need to have prerogative in terms of how they get their team ready”.

“We are choosing to manage it rather than prohibit it”, he said.

So, is Big 12 expansion going to happen?

Those two announcements inspired a Big 12 motto change.