Texas Christian 38 - 41 Arkansas (Final) (Double Overtime)

On January 4, 2012, West Virginia beat Clemson 70-33 in the Orange Bowl to win the Unofficial College Football Championship.  That was WVU's last game as a member of the Big East Conference; the next year they joined the Big XII.  And from that time until this -- more than four full football seasons -- every UCFC game has featured a member of the Big XII.  Our blog started in 2010, and here are the teams with the most comments:

Texas Christian:  459
Baylor:  311
W. Virginia:  239
Oklahoma St:  162

So that gives you a sense of who we've been writing about for the last four years.  Now that the Big XII has finally lost the title, here are a few final thoughts on this conference.

1.  When I started covering Big XII football, I was really troubled by the lack of defense that I saw in so many games -- and, in fact, I never got used to that.  But as time went on, I came to realize that what they've created in the Big XII is no soft run-and-shoot that will collapse against good competition.  If anything, the rest of college football is moving in their direction -- look at last year's 45-40 shootout between Alabama and Clemson for the National Championship.  In this game, for example, Arkansas really tried to avoid getting caught up in Texas Christian's usual style -- but in the end, Arkansas had to outscore the Horned Frogs in order to win.

2.  Having said that, I think there are a number of problems with the current Big XII.  The whole West Virginia thing just doesn't work -- the Mountaineers don't have any connection to the rest of the league, and the huge distance means that the home team has an enormous advantage in any game involving WVU and the rest of the conference.  It's also clear that the old Big 8 schools haven't adjusted well to this new era.  Missouri is an also-ran in the SEC; Colorado is an also-ran in the Pac-12; Nebraska is an also-ran in the Big 10.  The other Big 8 schools -- Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State -- are together in the Big XII, but Oklahoma is the only one of them with much of a claim to football prowess, and the others are never likely to make much of an impact.

3.  Things are much better in Texas, where Texas Christian and Baylor built very respectable programs -- thanks to good coaching and the immense flood of talent in that state.  But the University of Texas is not where it should be, and they are all diminished by the loss of Arkansas and Texas A & M to the SEC.  There are just too many games where the Texas schools are playing teams like Kansas or West Virginia or Iowa State, and you're thinking, "Why is this game being played?  Who really wants to watch these teams play each other?"

4.  I would love to see the Big 8 re-form.  Let Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma renew their ancient rivalries, and those teams will all have a better chance to make national names for themselves.  Down in Texas, let the four remaining Big XII schools -- Texas, Texas Christian, Texas Tech, and Baylor -- form a new Southwest Conference with Southern Methodist, Houston, Rice, and maybe Tulane.  That would be a fun conference with lots of rivalry games.  Keep the Texas/OU game as usual, but let it be a non-conference game once more, and let Texas finish with Texas A & M, while OU finishes with Nebraska.  In my opinion, every one of those schools would benefit from such an arrangement.  Leave WVU to find its own way in the East -- eventually the ACC would take the Mountaineers in, and they could renew their rivalries with Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse.

Of course, we will come back here some day -- there's too much talent in this part of the country to lose the UCFC for long.  I am happy to be returning to the SEC -- my own home conference -- but I have grown quite fond of Texas Christian, which has played in so many great UCFC games in recent years.  Gary Patterson is an amazing coach, and his success here is one of the great and underappreciated stories of college football over the last quarter century.

Texas Christian loses the UCFC, dropping its all-time record in UCFC games to 48-21-6.  Only Yale, Princeton, USC, Harvard, Penn, and Ohio State have won the Big Gold Trophy more often than the Horned Frogs.  We will miss them.