Bowlsby:B12 still pursuing champ game deregulation
Bowlsby repeated they would seek approval to stage a championship game with only 10 teams, but was unclear how they'd go about the process. In a recent story published by the San Diego Union-Tribune, former conference commissioners Wright Waters (Sun Belt) and Tom Hansen (PAC-12) scoffed at the notion other leagues would acquiesce when several leagues expanded in part to reach the 12-team threshold needed for holding a title game.
"Relative to the process, it's actually a great question right now because as you know the NCAA governance process has recently been restructured," Bowlsby said in the radio interview. "Previously, John Swofford and the ACC and I had asked the Board of Directors to consider deregulating the rules around conference playoff games... Relative to the rule, in the new day, it's not clear if the board can deal with that on a unilateral basis or whether it'll have to go into the governance structure through the NCAA council. We are asking those questions right now. We think that this is the kind of thing that could be handled in one form or another by next football season. But it isn't clear exactly where we access the system right now and at the January convention that's one of the things that we'll be working our way through."
Bowlsby then added if expansion was to be considered at some point, they'd likely look east and not west. Presumably, that would put schools like UCF, USF, Cincinnati, Memphis and UConn more in play and perhaps could rule out western candidates such as BYU and Boise State.
"We have one member in West Virginia that's on the East Coast," Bowlsby said. "We have to be mindful of their situation. If we took somebody in that was on the far West Coast it would certainly do a disservice to our member in West Virginia. As I mentioned earlier, it may be a different set of criteria to some of our members than it is to other members. As the commissioner, I certainly have to take all 10 institutions and their sensitivities into play."
"We don't have any schools on our radar at the present time," Bowlsby said. "As you know, the Grant of Rights was noted earlier in the previous question. Our institutions all have granted their rights to the Big 12. Several other conferences have Grants of Rights. There are some institutions that are essentially off the table. We don't have any expansion initiative. We don't have any list of prospects. We don't have any plans to expand. As our athletic directors, our CEOs, talk about what the model looks like, talk about the challenges of the future and talk about the immediate past experience we had with the playoff, you know, those are things that are going to get discussed. But we don't have any list. We don't have any initiative. I would say that the status quo is by far the most attractive status to most of our members."
Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Bianchi
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Bowlsby:B12 still pursuing champ game deregulation
