The Big Lead

Oregon's Big Ten Title Game Odyssey Highlights the Absurdity of Mega-Conferences

By Sam Westmoreland

Nov 16, 2024; Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Oregon Ducks mascot The Duck performs with cheerleaders during the game against the Wisconsin Badgers at Camp Randall Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images
Nov 16, 2024; Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Oregon Ducks mascot The Duck performs with cheerleaders during the game against the Wisconsin Badgers at Camp Randall Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images / Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images
facebooktwitter

The Oregon Ducks continued their undefeated run toward the College Football Playoff on Saturday, beating the Wisconsin Badgers 17-13 in a tough battle on the road in Madison. This moved the number one team in the country to 11-0 on the season, and 8-0 in the Big Ten. With records like that, you'd think that Oregon's place in the Big Ten Championship Game would be fully guaranteed at this point, or very, very close to it.

Unfortunately for you, me, and all of us, the Big Ten had other plans.

On Tuesday night, a full three days after the Ducks escaped the confines of Camp Randall Stadium and its legions of fans bouncing in unison to Jump Around, the Big Ten finally announced that, after days worth of calculation, number crunching, soothsaying, and breathing in the sacred vapors of Delphi, they had determined that the Ducks had clinched a trip to Indianapolis. This announcement left Ducks fans celebrating, but also joining legions of others in asking one question:

What the heck took so long?

The answer to that question is, simply: the conference is too dang big to figure out who the best teams are solely by the results on the field. You see, the Big Ten currently has four teams with records of either 8-0 or 7-1 in the conference: Indiana and Oregon are both undefeated, while Ohio State and Penn State each have one loss (Ohio State to Oregon and Penn State to Ohio State). And because Oregon doesn't play Penn State or Indiana, Penn State doesn't play Indiana either, and Indiana's potential singular conference loss could come against Ohio State, so using head-to-head records is essentially impossible, should Oregon lose to Washington this weekend and force all four teams to wind up 8-1.

RELATED: One slip up and the Group of Five race turns into all out war

According to The Athletic, a Big Ten official posited a scenario where, should Oregon fall to the Huskies, Penn State could sneak past them into the Big Ten title game. Ohio State would take the number one seed due to strength of schedule, and Penn State's strength of schedule powered them past the Ducks (who own a win over Ohio State) and into Indianapolis.

But after two days of researching their own protocols, the Big Ten decided that this scenario would revert to a previous tiebreaker state, wherein they use the teams with the best winning percentage against their best common opponent. And since Oregon beat Ohio State, they would take the spot over Penn State, who lost to Ohio State, and Indiana, who would lose to the Buckeyes in this scenario.

Confused? Get used to it, because in this era of bloated megaconferences lumbering around the college football landscape, absorbing teams with no geographic similarity and creating schedules where massive swathes of the teams involved won't play each other, it's going to become more and more common.

The Big Ten and ACC each have 18 teams; the SEC and Big 12 each have 16. That means that even with the Big Ten's nine-game conference schedule, there are still eight teams they haven't played. With that many unplayed teams and no divisions, you're going to have a logjam of teams at the top of the conference who haven't played the other teams at the top of the conference every year.

Which means we can expect plenty of these convoluted explanations, while officials pore over the tiebreaker documents like researchers trying to translate ancient scrolls from Sumerian.

It shouldn't be that hard to figure out who deserves to be in conference title games. It shouldn't require us to consult Tiebreaker Scholars, who reference their Rosetta Stones to translate the incoherent ramblings to us. But with the power conferences continuing to amass more and more power, and more and more teams, we can only expect these tiebreakers to get more and more convoluted.

We're swiftly approaching a future in which Kirk Herbstreit is standing in front of a smart board in an ESPN studio, explaining how Michigan needs a 3 percentage point gain to have a chance of making it to Indianapolis, frantically zooming in on East Lansing to illustrate where those gains could be made.

But hey, it also means we get the classic matchup of UCLA and Rutgers in Los Angeles at 9am local time, so that's a plus, right? Right?

MORE TOP STORIES From the Big Lead

CFB: Nightmare CFP scenario for Indiana and the committee

NFL: What will it cost the Jets to get out of Rodgers mess?

CBB/WNBA: Caitlin Clark goes viral for getting frustrated with refs

NBA: Most likely trade destination for Giannis Antetokounmpo