DALLAS – It took three questions before Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby was finally asked to comment about Oklahoma president Dave Boren’s remarks earlier this summer stating the Big 12 is “psychologically disadvantaged” with only 10 schools.

 

Bowlsby met with reporters Monday morning at the Omni Dallas Hotel in downtown Dallas to kickoff the Big 12’s annual two-day media event in the Metroplex.

 

“I lost the pool, I thought that would be the first question,” Bowlsby joked. “First of all, it will be the presidents' decision (whether or not to expand). It isn’t my decision. It isn’t our athletic directors’ decisions, although they will certainly have input in it.

 

“It is my understanding at the present time that the majority of our presidents and chancellors believe 10 is the right number for us. There are those who believe we should get larger, and they feel strongly about it. There are those who believe we should stay at 10, and they feel strongly about it. And there are probably four or five in the middle who are persuadable one way or another.”

 

Those in favor of remaining at 10 believe the pool of schools out there to add doesn’t bring the value to consider expansion, while those in favor of expansion believe 10 is not a workable number in today’s current power conference setup and puts the Big 12 at a disadvantage when it comes to the college football playoff.

 

Bowlsby said he is not sure there is enough of a sample size to make that assertion yet.

 

“Relative to the playoff, I don’t think one year makes a trend,” he said. “We were very close to having two teams in last year, and you don’t really have to have much of an imagination to see how that might have worked out where we would have gotten one and maybe two without too much of a stretch.

 

“So if we go another year and get left out and it appears to be systemic, we need to be mindful of it. That’s why we’ve gone about the process of trying to get the postseason rules deregulated,” he said. “We think that gives us a full array of options.”

 

In the meantime, Bowlsby believes it is imperative for the Big 12 to perform well outside the conference. He also indicated that nonconference schedules member schools play could end up on the league’s plate at some point down the road.

 

“There isn’t any question that the nonconference schedule of each of our institutions affects the strength of each of the other members of our league,” he said. “We can’t deny that. I don’t think it means that everybody has to play three top-20 teams in their preseason. I also think it doesn’t mean that everybody has to play three that are FCS or in the bottom of the FBS. I think there’s a happy medium there.”

 

Bowlsby indicated other conferences have mandated a specific formula for nonconference scheduling but he said the Big 12 hasn’t arrived there yet.

 

“Our athletic directors have not chosen to make it mandatory,” he noted. “They have respected those prerogatives on an institutional basis. I think we will continue to have that conversation, and it’s possible that we could get to a point where we need a little more structure around it. We haven’t gotten to that point yet, but it’s a live issue and we know that the strengths of some are affected by the strengths and weaknesses of others.”

 

The bottom line, according to Bowlsby, is the Big 12 simply has to perform better on the field. It’s been a decade since a Big 12 school has won a football national championship.

 

“We don’t just want to participate in the playoff; we want to win championships,” he said. “I think that is a clear enough aspiration and we haven’t been as successful as we would have liked to have been.

 

“What do we have to do? We have to get better. We have to win big games when we have them before us, and we have to demonstrate by competition in postseason that our conference has led us to be highly competitive at the end of the season.

 

“There are as many Division I recruits in Florida, Texas and California as there are in the other 47 states combined. All of our schools are recruiting heavily in Texas, and we have lots of competition here. We have to recruit better. We have to develop better. We have to play better. We have to win the big games when we have a chance to win the big games.”

 

Bowlsby continued.

 

“These things tend to be cyclical. I don’t think that those things sit tight forever,” he explained. “It’s easy to forget that, until Ohio State went through and ran the table in the postseason, everybody thought the Big Ten was having a fairly poor year last year. They hadn’t won a lot of games, and yet the top end of the league is pretty good.

 

“I think, likewise, the top of our league is really good, and I think all 10 of our schools are really competitive. We just about every year have a big upset of some sort, and the fact that six schools have won our championship (since 2009) is indicative of the level of competition.