The Big 12 Is Financially Falling Behind, And Fooling Itself About The College Football Playoff

Desperate to stay relevant in the ever-more competitive world of college athletics, the Big 12 needed something, anything to tell them what to do next.

How can the league stay financially viable? How can it maximize its College Football Playoff chances? If the Big 12 is unable to land television contracts as massive as its Power Five peers, the conference will be what commissioner Bill Bowlsby calls "$20 million per school behind" the Big Ten and SEC in coming years.

Searching for answers, Bowlsby has turned to (fake) math, hiring a research firm to conclude the following:

● If the Big 12 adds a conference championship game, its chances to make the College Playoff improve by five percent.

● If it expands to 12 teams, its chances improve 10-15 percent.

● Right now, it has a 68 percent chance of making the Playoff.

Bowlsby is super excited about these fancy conclusions:

Bowlsby calls Navigate Research 'best in the business.' Says its algorithm has predicted the 4 teams in first 2 College Football Playoffs.

— Chuck Carlton (@ChuckCarltonDMN)May 4, 2016

Earlier this week, the above information was presented to Big 12 coaches and athletic directors, reportedly to help conference members decide if they want to add schools, add a championship game, split into divisions, or some adopt some combination of those options. All in all, it was a strange show that seemed preemptively defensive and oddly public. It's like when your friend tells you he's fine without you even asking, and when you say "okay," he says again "no really, it's all okay!"

"Real curious as to why put that out there, then," said Chad McEvoy, a sports management professor and the chair of the Department of Kinesiology at Northern Illinois University. "The Big 12 is under no requirement (to release that information). They can't be FOIA'd."

Before we go any further, we should note that the Big 12 is in an increasingly uncompetitive situation when it comes to revenue. The Big Ten just got a TV deal that the Big 12 can't even dream of, the SEC is a money-burning Saturn V rocket ship, and it's likely that the Big 12's best schools, Texas and Oklahoma, would jump at better opportunities elsewhere if they could. So one way to read Bowlsby's presentation is as reassurance: don't worry, member schools, everything's gonna be alright. We're still a Playoff player, so we're still in this!

Thing is, the Big 12 is no less screwed now that it knows Bowlsby's paid-for—and frankly, nonsensical—Playoff odds. Not in terms of advancing schools to New Year's Eve, and not in terms of the bigger financial picture.

The Big 12's biggest focus has been how it can make the College Football Playoff. The league is hyper-concerned about the prospect of missing out on college football's premier event, even though at least one power conference has to miss out every year, and the Big 12 is a not-at-all-out-of-the-ordinary one-for-two.

The idea was that Navigate Research would run thousands (if not millions) of simulations to tell the Big 12, based on relative strength, how often the league would have teams that could make the Playoff. This is a simple idea—it's how the EA Sports NCAA Football video games would randomly determine who won the national championship whenever you simulated a season. But then the firm purported to do something it cannot possibly do: predict how the College Football Playoff selection committee would act if it were on the fence between, say, a one-loss Big 12 team and a one-loss Big Ten team.

"We have an insignificant amount of data to see who makes the CFP, because there's been two of them," economist Andy Schwarz said. "It's hard to figure out how and why Ohio State got ahead of the other teams the first year and turn that into the rule."

Can we determine whether a conference is, and can be, competitive with the rest of the nation? Of course. It's clear the Big 12 can, as Oklahoma made the Playoff in non-controversial fashion this past season. But it's impossible to use an algorithm to interpret the committee's decision-making tendencies when the committee has made only one controversial pick.

Perhaps 12-1 Ohio State gained an advantage over 11-1 Baylor and 11-1 TCU in 2014 because of its conference championship game domination, but we have no way of knowing whether that will happen every time. If the Big Ten didn't have a conference championship game, 12-0 Iowa probably would have made the Playoff (the Hawkeyes missed out after losing the Big Ten title game).

The committee already has changed its criteria more than once—from body clocks to strength of schedule—so putting a percentage on the weight of a conference championship, based on one data point, is statistically impossible.

"That's somebody at Navigate making stuff up," Schwarz said. "Let's kind of stick our finger up in the air and this is what they care about."

That is not a shot at Navigate, which presumably is doing the best it can. It's simply a statement of fact on how such a small sample size cannot possibly determine the best way to maximize a conference's playoff potential in what is clearly an arbitrary process.

Perhaps the research could tell the Big 12 whether its top teams would have an easier time reaching the Playoff if the league expanded to 12 teams, adding weaker football schools like UConn and Cincinnati, which have been identified as two top targets. However, that would not even begin to address the Big 12's revenue problems.

On one hand, the league would get more revenue from adding additional members; on the other, there's no guarantee that new members will trigger massive new revenues. History says that money isn't coming from conference championship games. The Big Ten distributed over $32 million to each of its school in 2014-15, but only $335,000 of that—or one percent—came from the Big Ten Championship Game. A title game will not make a dent in revenue on its own.

Moreover, adding teams just for television revenue might not work as well as hoped. The Big Ten profited big-time off of adding the New York and Washington, D.C. markets through Rutgers and Maryland, but the majority of that money came because it could now sell the Big Ten Network to a pair of massive cable television markets, thanks to the collective fan bases of Rutgers, Maryland and the existing Big Ten teams in New York and the Washington area—not because an existing third-party sports network wanted to pay that much more for Rutgers and Maryland football games.

Without a conference network of its own, the Big 12 would be hoping existing networks would pay enough to make adding two mediocre schools worth it. (Also worth noting: the Pac-12 Network isn't as lucrative the Big Ten and SEC Networks, which shows that simply having your own channel doesn't guarantee financial parity).

"Right now the [Big 12's] revenue pie is split 10 ways," McEvoy said. "If you split it 12 ways instead of 10, you have to [grow] the pie enough to make it worth doing that."

For the Big 12, that sort of growth seems unlikely. Barring massive conference realignment, there just aren't any ultra-valuable schools or television markets still up for grabs. Yet as the college football money machine moves closer to its final form—and seems to be leaving the Big 12 in its dust—Bowlsby needs something to cheer his members up. So he procured some faulty math to tell them this:

● Conference championship + expansion = marginally improved Playoff chances

● Marginally improved Playoff chances + ???? = profit and viability

Maybe expansion will help the Big 12 keep up a little bit. Maybe it even gets a conference network and strikes it semi-rich. But more likely than not, the Big 12 will continue to remain vulnerable, regardless of its perfectly acceptable College Football Playoff chances—and no matter how much its leaders try to tell themselves otherwise.