So Jim Delany is talking about change now? Good because the B1G is in need of some

Baffled. Blown away. Stunned.

When B1G commissioner Jim Delany spoke at Media Days in Chicago this past July, that was my reaction after listening to him spout off about the conference’s “historic” season because of its bowl record and TV viewership.

Delany made no mention of the fact that for the first time, the B1G was left out of the Playoff. Instead, he bragged about the conference’s strength of schedule.

Five months later, the B1G is out of the Playoff for the second straight year. For the third straight year, its conference champ will be on the outside looking in. And for the fourth straight year, the B1G will score as many Playoff points as an FCS conference. Ohio State just became the first 1-loss Power 5 conference champ to miss out on a Playoff spot.

That’s bad. Like, real bad.

Delany now seems to be recognizing that the B1G has a problem on its hands, and it’ll need to change if it wants a resolution. Well, sort of.

While speaking at the Sports Business Journal Intercollegiate Athletics Forum on Wednesday, Delany was asked about the idea of switching to the Big 12 format for the conference championship. That is, simply taking the teams with the best 2 conference records and pitting them against one another.

Surprisingly, Delany admitted it’s on the table.

“It’s an item that has been discussed before,” Delany said, according to Stadium’s Brett McMurphy. “There is actually more discussion now than there was four years ago.”

There better be. Four years ago, the B1G had just won the first College Football Playoff National Championship. There wasn’t any reason to change something that was working…yet the B1G went ahead and did so anyway.

Since switching to the 9-game conference schedule in 2016, the B1G has yet to send its champion to the Playoff. Meanwhile, the ACC and SEC are the only conferences to have had the 8-game conference schedule in every year of the Playoff’s existence, and as a result, they’re the only conferences to have earned Playoff berths in every season.

Nothing forced the B1G to go to a 9-game conference schedule. Nothing is preventing the B1G from switching back to an 8-game conference schedule, either. There’s nothing wrong with admitting “yeah, we’re beating up on each other and hurting our Playoff chances.”

Oh wait. Apparently there is something wrong with admitting that.

Delany says the Big Ten has no plans to stop playing nine league games per year. "We’re a conference that wants to play each other a bunch," he said. "That nine is sort of in cement."

— Adam Rittenberg (@ESPNRittenberg) December 5, 2018

Well, that’s a bummer.

Delany also went on to say that he thought that Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State could all win it all this year.

Um, that’s not how this works. You see, the field is still at 4 teams. None of those teams deserved to make a 4-team field, and it was their own doing that held them out. You can’t lose 3 conference games like Penn State did, and you can’t lose your 2 biggest games like Michigan did, nor can you get your teeth kicked in by an unranked team and play rather mediocre football for half the year like Ohio State did.

That’s reality. Claiming that those 3 teams could’ve won a national title after they were eliminated from that conversation isn’t living in reality. It’s living in denial. They had their chances and they blew them.

Under the aforementioned Big 12 model, Ohio State and Michigan would’ve had a rematch in the B1G Championship. The Buckeyes could’ve potentially had a significantly better win than Oklahoma and gotten in. We don’t know how that would’ve played out, but it certainly would’ve given the B1G a better chance than it had this year.

And perhaps under the 8-game conference model, either Michigan or Ohio State would’ve entered the conference title game as unbeatens instead of already having 1 B1G loss apiece. Again, the chances of a Playoff berth increase.

Just look at the numbers through 5 years of this system:

• Playoff percentage for 9 conference games: 42%
• Playoff percentage for 8 conference games: 100%
• Playoff percentage for division champs winning in conf. championship: 70%
• Playoff percentage for non-division champs winning in conf. championship (2 best conf. records): 100%

More specifically for the Playoff percentage for division champs winning in a conference championship, it’s only been 58 percent in the last 3 years. That, of course, has a lot to do with the fact that the B1G hasn’t sent its conference champ to the Playoff in each of the last 3 years.

Interestingly enough, the only time that all 4 conferences who had conference championships decided by division winners that yielded Playoff berths was 2014. As Delany said, nobody was in any hurry to change anything 4 years ago. And now, maybe “hurry” isn’t the right word. The skeptics would argue that the 5-year sample size is still too small to do something radical like abolish divisions or switch to a 9-game conference schedule.

To that, I’d argue that waiting a decade to change the most difficult path to the Playoff would be foolish. The numbers back it up.

If Delany really does believe that there were 3 B1G teams capable of winning the title this year — even though there weren’t — surely he can take a look in the mirror and realize that having them play each other in divisional play isn’t helping the conference.

The hope that the ACC and SEC would switch to a 9-game conference schedule should be gone. The B1G can no longer sit there and cry foul when clearly, those 2 conferences aren’t doing anything wrong with their scheduling in the eyes of the selection committee.

And if the fear of devaluing rivalries or losing out on revenue of an extra conference game are the concerns, they shouldn’t be. You can still keep rivalry games just like the SEC does, and the increased likelihood of more bowl revenue for the conference — it’s easier to reach that feat with 4 non-conference games — should squash the notion that money is keeping the B1G locked into its current model.

Delany is someone who has been as innovative as anyone in college football in the 21st century. Surely he can see the writing on the wall here.

Or rather, his own writing in cement.

Connor O'Gara

Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Tradition. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.