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Big Ten to Big 12: 'Hey, You're Doing It Wrong. Great Idea!'

The Big 12 managed to pull an astonishing stunt last year in screwing up the BCS before the BCS could ever get a hand on it. This came thanks to a poorly rigged tiebreaker system relying entirely on the BCS rankings to break a three way tie. This omitted a further step of comparing the head-to-head records again, a step included in the SEC's tiebreaker, and one that would have sent Texas -- who beat Oklahoma 45-35 last year -- to the BCS title game, instead of the Sooner. ↵

↵This ignited controversy, buoyed the important banner economy of the Oklahoma/Texas corridor, and insured that no one would make the same mistake by leaving out the clarifying step of including the final head-to-head records to avoid the nonsense of last year. That is, unless you're the Michael Scott of college football conferences, the Big Ten, and more than willing to embrace a system that would rely on the BCS rankings to determine who goes to the Rose Bowl: ↵

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↵⇥The Big Ten is changing the tiebreaker system for its football championship, adopting the Big 12’s much-panned procedure of relying on Bowl Championship Series rankings as the ultimate decider. It was that system that resulted in Oklahoma playing in the Big 12 title game (and ultimately for the national title) because it jumped co-division champs Texas and Texas Tech (all with one loss) in the BCS standings. ↵
↵Hey, that dumb thing you're doing? WE LOVE IT. This could end up affecting the final national title in horrifying, unimaginable ways, but that's the college football offseason now: ever-worsening degrees of insanity dotted with college football arrests. Oh, and the Big Ten is responding confidently to their sliding national profile by not keeping up with a national trend in rising coaches' salaries, too. Big Ten Chairman Bizarro Superman thinks everything is going swimmingly, by the way.↵

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.