Not only did they win a conference championship, but they did it in convincing fashion, shutting out the Wisconsin Badgers 59-0. The last time the Badgers were shut out was in August of 1997. Beating the 17th ranked team in the nation, coming into last week, should have been a tough enough task for the Buckeyes, who were starting their third-string quarterback, but they one-upped themselves. If the playoff committee needed something to convince them that Ohio State deserved the final spot over the likes of TCU and Baylor, that was enough. This very reason is why that conference championship win was OSU's "trump card".
So yeah, basically what I'm saying is TCU and Baylor didn't hold their destiny in their own hands when it came into the last week of the season. The reason that I say this is because if either team did, then I don't see why neither one of their wins would've been convincing enough to earn them the final spot in the playoff. Baylor topped Kansas State, by 11 points, in a showdown of top 10 teams, and TCU beat Iowa State, a conference rival, by 52 points. Which led to this tweet from TCU's WR Kolby Listenbee:
Yall want us to score 100 next time?
— Kolby J. ™️ (@List10bee_Swagg) December 7, 2014
In response to Kolby's tweet, that most likely wouldn't have been enough either. When you are virtually neck-and-neck with a team like Ohio State, with what they just accomplished, and you're riding on a 52 point win over a team that was 2-9, that's just not enough.
If either one of the first two teams out deserved to take that illusive final spot from OSU, it was Baylor. One, because they handed TCU their only loss of the season, and two, because they defeated a top ten team in K-State during the final week of the season. The only difference is that Ohio State's game meant more because it was a conference championship.
The problem here though, is that it's not TCU or Baylor's fault that they didn't play in a conference championship game to end the year, the fault lies on the BIG 12. When your conference doesn't hold a championship game, like many other conferences, you are left to fill that week with another game that most likely won't be as important. So, when you need to make a statement at the end of the year to a committee, like the one that decided both team's fates, you don't have much of an argument over a situation like the one OSU forced at the end of their season.
I hope that this post brought a little bit of clarity to anyone who is utterly baffled as to why a team like Ohio State, who lost to Virginia Tech with a record of 6-6, took the final spot. If the BIG 12 would change their conference format it would make it a lot easier for a team within their conference that needs to make a statement in the last week of the season, to do so.
In the mean time, I will be working on a blog post about how a change like the one I mentioned would benefit the teams in the BIG 12, and I will post it here once finished.
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