Sooners making changes after upset loss

Oklahoma prepared for Texas Tech all week as four-touchdown favorites while its rival up north, Oklahoma State, listened to critics place it on upset alert all week heading into a road matchup against Missouri.

The Sooners, you might have heard by now, lost. Oklahoma State won by three touchdowns.

Oklahoma decided to limit its media access following the loss to just one post-practice opportunity instead of the usual three. The move is reminiscent of late last season when the Sooners closed their season with two mammoth road games against Baylor and Oklahoma State and trimmed media access to a few select players.

Did Oklahoma let the confidence of others outside the locker room get in its head? Who knows? But Texas coach Mack Brown, not speaking specifically about the Sooners, says it wouldn't be the first time that's happened to a team.

Brown's wife, Sally, likes to tell him she knows nothing about football, but she's learned at least one thing over the years.

"She says about the time someone says, 'That absolutely cannot happen,' is when it happens," Brown told reporters during the weekly Big 12 coaches teleconference. "Kids sit around all week and listen to the fans. They listen to the media, and when people are talking about the other team not having a chance to win -- or you start talking about a game down the road instead of the one that week -- it is a very, very dangerous thing. That's why coaches get so paranoid about games each week. All of us have been in one of those, and when you've been in one, that's enough. That'll keep your attention for the rest of them."

Oklahoma experienced that disappointment on Saturday. Oklahoma State didn't, but Mike Gundy knows a similar performance from his team could produce a similar result.

"You try to do everything you can as a coach to stress the importance of trying to play at a high level every week," Gundy said. "The example that I've used is that we're in March Madness from Sept. 1 in college football. There are not many opportunities to slip and continue to have a chance to be there at the end of the season."

Oklahoma State is one of just eight remaining undefeated teams left, including two in the Big 12. It's the highest-ranked Big 12 team, five spots above fellow undefeated Kansas State, which hosts Oklahoma this week. The challenge ahead of the Cowboys is clear: avoid the fate Oklahoma fell victim to against Texas Tech.

"We think as a coaching staff that the greatest challenge we have now is to get them to play at a high level 12 weeks in a row," Gundy said.

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Analysis: Tweaks in B.C.S. Could Results From Conference Changes

Those were the good old days, before a wave of off-the-field scandal and realignment uncertainty engulfed the sport, the real-time drama distracting everyone from the annual end-of-season headaches.

But with the release of the B.C.S. standings Sunday night, the potential for college football’s season to end with a lot of unhappy undefeated teams became clear. There are nine undefeated teams that could make a case that they should play for the title — sorry, No. 19 Houston, you’re not one of them — and yet another awkward finish appears likely.

But perhaps more important, with so much big-picture change brewing, the biggest question among the sport’s administrators is whether the shifts in conferences’ makeup will result in significant changes to the B.C.S.

As the tumult of conference expansion has defined the past three months, the B.C.S. coordinator, Bill Hancock, has been calling commissioners and administrators to brainstorm about potential changes. The B.C.S. contract expires at the end of the 2013 regular season, and Hancock said a mechanism had been set up for B.C.S. leadership to discuss potential changes. Hancock said changes would be determined in the next calendar year, as they have to be prepared to be presented to ESPN for its exclusive negotiation window by next fall.

“Because it is so early in the process, it wouldn’t be appropriate to even try to describe the general direction right now, except to say that I am hearing little to no sentiment for an F.C.S.-style playoff,” Hancock wrote in an e-mail Sunday. He was referring to the Football Championship Subdivision, which has a playoff format for its national title.

Hancock added that the integrity of the regular season and the bowl experience were priorities to be preserved, which are familiar talking points. The party line from university presidents has always been that a playoff in college football would interfere with academics, spoil the regular season and professionalize a sport that is having difficulty rationalizing its vestiges of amateurism.

But even with conferences seemingly growing as fast as television contracts are increasing in value, the resistance to extreme change in the B.C.S. is severe.

The Big Ten commissioner, Jim Delany, who has long been an advocate of the sport’s vibrant regular season and his league’s relationship with the Rose Bowl, said it was a leap to think that bigger leagues were a gateway to a playoff system.

“That’s not a logical conclusion,” he said in a phone interview Sunday. “The reasons people do or don’t judge a viewpoint on the system is not related to the size of a conference.”

There are a few possible B.C.S. discussions that everyday fans would care about. That would include adding a B.C.S. bowl game — the Cotton Bowl is commonly mentioned — to increase the number of B.C.S. bids and changing the limit of two teams per conference for B.C.S. games.

During the build-up to the current B.C.S. contract, there was a formal discussion of whether leagues would favor the so-called Plus One model, which would essentially have the top four teams play off in the B.C.S.

Just moving to have a discussion about the Plus One model was a big deal, and only the commissioners Mike Slive of the Southeastern Conference and John Swofford of the Atlantic Coast Conference favored it. There was so little interest that a vote wasn’t even taken.

Plus One was ultimately seen as a gateway to a bigger playoff, and college football still appears a long way from trending in that direction. During the expansion boom the past two years, a common refrain was that the march toward 16-team superconferences would inevitably lead to a playoff.

Delany said he did not see that.

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Favre talks about changes during 20-year career

How many players can compare what the NFL was like 20 years ago to what it’s like right now? The answer is not many. In fact, it’s currently two: John Kasay and Brett Favre.

So I had the chance to sit down with Favre last week and talk football, and we had an interesting conversation about what has changed in the league during his career.

When I asked Favre what he has seen over that time, he said there’s no doubt that players have gotten bigger, faster and stronger. But he also said something else interesting — that the role of the officials and their calls made on the field are changing the outcome of games more than ever.

Favre said that when he entered the league, he clearly knew what a catch was. Right now, he isn’t certain. He also doesn’t know what exactly pass interference is anymore.

I thought this was phenomenal.

We also talked about the ruling against Visanthe Shiancoe in the end zone against the Packers on Oct. 24. It was ruled a catch on the field, overturned via replay, and then an apology was later issued because it should have been a catch. But from Favre’s view, they still lost the game.

In talking about players being bigger, faster and stronger, one of the roles of replay was supposed to slow things down on the field for officials. The players move so much faster than they did 20 years ago.

I absolutely agree with Favre. When I entered the league, there was no replay as part of the officiating. Whatever happened on the field, you had to get over it and move on. And there was no going back and looking at it weeks later and complaining. You just had to man up.

But I will say that I never felt like the officials ever cost us a game. It would be disappointing to feel like you won a game but the officials changed the outcome. For the most part, replay is getting it right. But when they use replay to slow the game down and still get it wrong, it’s disturbing. There are many players around the league who talk about this trend.

It would just leave me sick, and I think Favre felt that way after the loss this season at Lambeau Field.

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