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Much has been made in recent years about the format of the college football playoff, which switched to a new layout in the 2024 season and ended with Ohio State hoisting the national championship trophy. Some conferences, particularly the Big 12, feel they have been shortchanged by the system and have floated new models, including the “5+11” model, which would give automatic bids to the five highest rated conference champions and 11 at-large bids determined by the committee.
Recently, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark doubled down on this proposed idea of 5+11.
“Five-11 is fair,” Yormark said at Big 12 media day, per Adam Rittenberg of ESPN. “We want to earn it on the field. It might not be the best solution today for the Big 12 … but long-term, knowing the progress we're making, the investments we're making, it's the right format for us. And I'm doubling down today on 5-11.”
He added that “I have a lot of faith in the selection process,” Yormark said. “They are doing a full audit of the selection process to figure out how they can modernize and contemporize and how they use data and how certain metrics can be more heavily weighted.”
Last year, the only Big 12 team to make the college football playoff was Arizona State, who lost to Texas in their first game.
As for 2025, Yormark predicted that “(the Big 12) will be the deepest league in college football,” per Brett McMurphy of On3 Sports.
Of course, college football as a whole has undergone drastic shifts in recent years with conference realignments sending former Big 12 schools like Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC.
This has called into question whether the perceived talent disparity between different conferences may have grown even larger as a result of these changes.
In any case, don't expect Brett Yormark or his fellow Big 12 executives to be letting this go anytime soon.
