I posted this over on BON, but wanted to get a discussion going here too on the Big 12's Out of Conference Scheduling, and college football's in general. The SEC's OOC is particularly egregious.

This changes scheduling. First for the Big 10 and eventually for college football. I've maintained for a few years now that the Big 12 has a perception problem, and the fastest way to solve it would be on the field. I've thus supported the Big 12 as a league requiring that all Non Conference games be at least G5 level with one Power5 game thrown in each year.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/25255626/new-big-ten-schedule-commitment-at-least-one-power-five-game-no-fcs

But now the Big 10 has beat us to the punch, which is a good move on their part. If not for the late season run of dominating Ohio State performances, they looked likely to be left out and had been talked about as a down conference. Now, less than a year later they have the defending national champion, and a Michigan team that may not be good this year, but will be good quick, fast, and in a hurry with Harbaugh at the helm.

The Big 12 needs to quickly follow suit. Playing meaningful OOC games would give us the ability to prove that we deserve our place in the Power 5, and generally just provides much better football to watch.

No longer would the Playoff committee question the schedule of our championship team. We clearly have a perception problem, getting the FCS games off the schedule would certainly help us improve the perception of our league. Having our top teams beat a P5 team from a different conference in September would let people know that we mean business.

And although the Big 10 beat us to the punch, if we move quickly to require a schedule similar to the Big 10's, we could benefit from being the Power 5 conference on most of their teams' schedule next year.

In addition, we should strategically plan our G5 required games so that we play teams who we think might be expansion candidates in the future. Let's add Houston, Rice, Tulane, ECU, UCF, Memphis, Cincinnati, Northern Illinois, Boise, San Diego State, and BYU to the Big 12 schedule. Each Big 12 team would play one of the aforementioned teams every year as one of their G5 games, and over the course of ten years, the entire league would rotate through playing each G5 team on that list.

There are two benefits of this. First, your give a possible expansion candidate a trial by fire in football. Should we ever need to add them, we know they can hang with us at that point. Second, it would improve the schedule fo the Big 12, so that even if Baylor was required to play only G5 or above, they couldn't go out and schedule the Buffalo's and UTSA's of the world.

The Big 12 needs to quickly join the Big 10 to lead the way in SOS in college football. While we commonly lead from behind, we need to move to stronger scheduling requirements ASAP. It's the best way to change the perception of our entire conference.