Is Missouri the North’s best?
OU plays Missouri for the Big 12 football championship on Saturday, and while all the focus has been on whether Sooners are deserving to represent the South, maybe the question belongs up North, too.
Missouri and Nebraska tied for the Big 12 North Division title at 5-3, followed by Kansas at 4-4. Mizzou won the tiebreaker, routing Nebraska 52-17.
But upon closer inspection, the North was a three-way tie, too. Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas each finished 4-1 against North teams. Mizzou beat Nebraska, Nebraska beat Kansas and KU beat Missouri, the latter game just last week.
Kansas finished behind Nebraska and Missouri for the simplest of reasons: the Jayhawks had to play all three of the South Division powers. KU played OU, Texas and Texas Tech, losing to all three.
Nebraska played Tech and OU, but not Texas.
Missouri played Texas but not Tech or OU.
Truth is, Missouri has been no more impressive than Kansas or Nebraska. The Tigers lost big to Texas and at home to Oklahoma State. Mizzou barely escaped Baylor with a victory.
Some people are arguing that OU doesn’t belong in the Big 12 title game. You could make the same argument about Missouri.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Lets put it this way,the North division is a joke.
The conference should have made a ruling that put the two best teams in there and that would have been OU & Texas.
Berry, did you not once call the Big 12 North a trainwreck? Has that changed? Last year, when it came down to Kansas and Missouri in the final game of the regular season, everyone thought that the dominance had shifted from South to North, but evidently it was a fluke. Now, the best Missouri can hope for is to pull an upset like K-State did in ’03 — they’ve got nothing to lose, and there is no more dangerous an opponent. Go, Sooners!
Barry,
The question is, why is ANYONE in the north playing in the Big 12 Championship? This game should be OU/UT.
Then the Sooners would prove they DO belong there.
I’m sick of all this ‘undeserving’ bull the media is hyping.
OU is as deserving as any team to be in the Championship game, because the Big XII RULES put them in the game!
To hear ABC/ESPN and Texas fans talk, you’d think they lost the second tie breaker of a two-way tie for the conference championship. They lost the FIFTH tie breaker of a THREE way tie for the DIVISION championship. The rules regarding the tie breaker were neither unclear nor hidden, and you give up your control of the situation when you lose a game. It sounds a little like a team complaining that they lost the game because the refs decided to actually start enforcing holding penalities.
This talk of the Big 12 South being dominant forever is a joke. All of this is cyclical. The big 12 north was easily the dominant division in the nineties, minus a couple of fluke upsets in ’96, and ’98. The south is up now but things will gradually even out in the next 5 or 10 years. The Big 12 is just a baby and it’s going to have it’s mood swings. Once maturity hits things will be more competitive on both sides. And one last point, can we call the ’03 wildcat win an upset or abberation? It was 35 to 7 . . . That’s not an upset, it’s an ass whoopin.
Fact is, Mizzou won the North with zero controversy. Is this a way to take heat off OU because TX was more deserving than OU?
This idea that the North was a three-way tie was formulated so that you had some something to write just before midnight, pathetic shot in the dark. Are you really that stupid? Mizzou has underperformed this year, but against the North they’ve lost one game in the past two years, the Kansas debacle last week. Otherwise it hasn’t even been close, not to mention the 52-17 bombarding in Lincoln this year. Stick to what you know, and that’s OU homerism, and when you’re desperate for something to write at least find something with substance.
Every conference that plays a championship game with 2 divisions takes the winner of each division. This is the way it is done and it is fair. Since every team from the North does not play every team from the South, this is the only way to see what team is the best. The North will come back in a few years and then we will be complaining about the weak South teams. ;>
Some of these posts sounds like sour grapes. Barry, keep on writing! I may not agree with all your opinions, but you are knowledgeable in sports, not just a Monday quarterback! Missouri won and OU won, we’ll let them battle it out tomorrow, then you can argue merits next year after all the season has played out. But don’t bash the one telling you the reasons for or against, he is just doing his job!
Hey Sooner people…lest we remind you of your glory days in the 90s. The same could have been said for the Big 12 North when Nebraska, Kansas State, and Colorado were beating you guys, Tech, and Texas like a drum with regularity. Point being, it all goes in cycles, and all of the success (largely due to coaching in my opinion) happens to have fallen on the South the last 5-7 years…
All of this three way tie talk aside, Oklahoma is the best team in the south and Missouri is the best team in the north. Oklahoma got beaten in a rivalry game by Texas on a neutral field IN TEXAS. Missouri got beaten by Kansas who approached the rivalry game as their Super Bowl. Bottom line: You can criticize how these ties are broken but in this situation, the two best teams from their division are in this game and that is the way it should be.
Have another shot why dontcha. Seriously, were you totally hammered when you wrote this?
M-I-Z-F-O-U!!!
Berry Tramel is the biggest f*ing idiot I’ve ever met. And yes, I have met him. He’s a huge d-bag, and I’m worse off for having made his acquaintance.
Boise State, do you have a dog in this fight? I didn’t think so. So what’s your problem.? OU people respect your team for the great game they played us in the Fiesta Bowl and all the Boise State fans I came in contact with there were very nice…but apparently there are some big fat jerks in Idaho, too.
Of course Mizzou deserves to be in the Title Game as the North Champion. We pummelled Nebraska. Kansas finished a game behind us. They aren’t even in the picture. Doesn’t go by division record, it goes by conference record. Should an NFL team win their division if they have a worse overall record? Absurd premise.
As far as the top 2 teams going to the Title Game regardless of division, well first you people are going to have to take that up with the NCAA because they require a 2 division conference with the champions meeting to even have a conference championship game.
I suppose if you want to ignore actual facts, let alone records and head-to-head match ups, you could make this case.
Only a retard would try, though. If the shoe fits…
Hey everyone –
Barry wasn’t talking about a three way tie in either division. All he was saying is that he isn’t sure that Missouri is the best team in the North…
If you really want to look at it, right now OU is playing the best out of any team in the South, and that’s how they got the votes from AP and Coaches and the Computer ranking. And along the same lines he’s saying that Missouri isn’t deserving of the standing from the North.
It’s not an argument about a three way tie or a tie-breaker. Instead he’s commenting on the fact that he believes Kansas or Nebraska is the better team RIGHT NOW. So stop reading too far into this, and stop thinking he’s trying to justify Oklahoma’s placement in the Big 12 Championship game … it’s not what he’s going after.
BTW Barry, I agree with you right now that Missouri isn’t the best team in the North. I may be biased because I’m from Lincoln and I cover the Huskers, but KU and NU would put up just as much of a fight as Mizzou against a far superior OU team tonight. None of those three would beat the Sooners, but I can’t say that any one of those teams has distinguished themselves as better than the other — and I’m not convinced Mizzou is the best.
Good post.
Michael
Hey, Berry — I’m in Austin, where it doesn’t matter whether it was a Nebraska-Mizzou tie in the north or a Nebraska-Mizzou-Kansas tie. NO ONE IN THIS TOWN SEEMS TO COMPREHEND THAT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TWO-WAY AND A THREE-WAY TIE. Just take the game that your team won, and say that that’s the only one that mattered; that’s how they break log-jams in Texas!
Boomer Sooner!