MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — For a fleeting moment early in the Orange Bowl’s fourth quarter, Texas Tech’s opportunity to salvage one of the most embarrassing performances in the history of the College Football Playoff was at hand.
The Red Raiders certainly didn’t deserve it. Their offense had spent the first 2½ hours bumbling through the playbook, unable to block, unable to throw, unable to catch. The only thing they’d done with any proficiency was turn the ball over.
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And yet here they were, down just two scores to Oregon, threatening to find the end zone for the first time all day. The Ducks’ own mistakes had provided a tourniquet, and Texas Tech stood a mere nine yards away from a touchdown that would have turned up the pressure on a team that hadn’t been given any reason to doubt its destiny.
A championship team would have scored there. Instead, what Texas Tech did — a how-can-you-throw-that-ball interception from quarterback Behren Morton — provided another layer of cement on a narrative college football can no longer ignore.
In a moment when administrators, fans and media members are questioning the viability of schools outside the four power conferences, even pushing to exclude them from the CFP, it’s time to consider whether the Big 12 is perpetrating a fraud on college football.
Is this collection of schools still worthy of being called a power conference?
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“We didn’t play good enough,” Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire said moments after Oregon wrapped up its 23-0 victory. “It really wasn’t the patch on anybody’s arm.”
Texas Tech didn’t put up much of a fight against Oregon at the Orange Bowl. (James Gilbert/Getty Images)
(James Gilbert via Getty Images)
Perhaps conference affiliation had nothing to do with Texas Tech’s measly nine first downs, going 6-for-19 on third/fourth-down conversions, or turning the football over four times.
But Texas Tech was the ninth team to represent the Big 12 since the CFP began a dozen years ago. It’s the eighth to have lost. TCU’s upset over Michigan in the 2022 semifinals remains the only time a Big 12 team has won a playoff game.
This Texas Tech team was supposed to be different than the undersized gimmickry the Big 12 usually sends to a playoff slaughter. Backed by billionaire former player Cody Campbell, the Red Raiders spent a reported $28 million putting together this roster. They were physically elite on defense. They didn’t just win the Big 12, they battered it into submission, beating BYU — clearly the league’s second-best team — by scores of 29-7 and 34-7.
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And even on a day Oregon struggled with mistakes and offensive execution, Texas Tech wasn’t even in their same weight class.
“This shouldn’t discredit them,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said. “I remember this feeling last year.”
He’s right. This shouldn’t discredit Texas Tech, which managed to wring more out of this season than any team in program history.
It should, however, discredit the Big 12.
Maybe 30 yards away from where Morton threw that final interception, in a room just past the tunnel at Hard Rock Stadium, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark met with reporters about an hour before Thursday’s kickoff.
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“I love our chances [Thursday],” he said, while insisting that the outcome of the game had nothing to do with the influence his conference wields in discussions about the future of the CFP.
“We have a big voice in that room,” Yormark said, suggesting on three different occasions that he sits alongside the SEC’s Greg Sankey, the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti and the ACC’s Jim Phillips as equals on the throne.
But Yormark, who worked for NASCAR, the Brooklyn Nets and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation agency before finding his way to college sports 3½ years ago, did not offer that same courtesy when the topic turned to Group of Five inclusion.
As conference commissioners consider whether to expand the playoff next year — ESPN has set a Jan. 23 deadline to figure out a new structure or stay with the current 12-team format — the hottest of hot buttons will be whether they establish a new standard for non-power conference teams to make the playoff.
Oregon’s defense beat up on Texas Tech all game and forced four turnovers. (David Rosenblum/Getty Images)
(Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
This year’s anomalous inclusion of Tulane and James Madison — both of which were blown out in first-round games — is certainly never going to happen again. But some administrators in leagues like the American Conference, the reconfigured Pac-12 and the Mountain West believe negative commentary around the concept of “inclusion” is part of a coordinated effort to essentially kick them out of the playoff altogether.
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Asked whether he believed there was consensus among the power conference commissioners that a Group of Five representative should be guaranteed a spot in the next iteration of the playoff, Yormark’s smarmy response practically gave away the game.
“Frankly, that’s a great question, and I don’t want to speak to that,” he said. “I mean, listen, there’s 10 commissioners and obviously Notre Dame that are on the management committee, and we all communicate and we’re all being very thoughtful about it. I will say that the Power Four commissioners are spending more time together to work through what expansion might look like. But there’s a lot of things we have to weigh and consider and we’ll see what happens.”
Yormark didn’t have to say another word to make it clear where he stands.
But the question we should all be asking is whether it’s because he doesn’t believe the unwashed Group of Five masses belong in the playoff or because he’s afraid the Big 12 would be rendered irrelevant if it were forced to earn its keep.
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We just watched the team that dominated his conference all year get reduced to ashes by the third-best team in the Big Ten. Who’s the charity case now, Brett?
Because even if you believe Texas Tech had an unusually bad day, this was the kind of playoff game we’ve seen many times before where you could have played it 10 times and gotten a similar result. That’s how much of a mismatch it was.
While the bureaucracy of the CFP is what keeps the Big 12 in its privileged position at the table with the SEC and Big Ten, the democratization of the sport through NIL and playoff expansion has exposed it as a lie.
Are we really going to pretend that the Big 12 champion deserves any guarantees in the future CFP while a league with one playoff win in 12 years works to block or raise the threshold for a team like Tulane?
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“Today’s game has no bearing on it,” Yormark said. “I’m all about progress. Would [Texas Tech winning] show progress? 100 percent. But it has nothing to do with what goes on in the room.”
Maybe it should.
Hey, at least Texas Tech tried. Yes, the amount of money Campbell and other boosters spent on this team was obscene, but they got some bang for their buck. The defense they put together was phenomenal and certainly had something to do with Oregon struggling to get the ball in the end zone.
But it’s equally clear that whatever the Red Raiders faced week-in and week-out in the Big 12 prepared them poorly to face a team with elite size and speed on both sides of the ball. Texas Tech had a great season, but one that was almost certainly inflated by lack of worthy competition.
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“That’s a really good defense,” McGuire said. “They did a great job defending us. We’ve been a big-play offense and they kept the ball in front of them. You can’t turn the ball over four times.”
In college football, the politics driving the sport and the reality on the field are often misaligned. As the Big 12 tries to ensure playoff access for itself and perhaps make it tougher for would-be competitors, Texas Tech helped make it crystal clear why Yormark wants no part of a meritocracy.
If you’re going to continue to call yourself a power conference, it would help to show up to these games once in a while and deliver a little power.
