The NCAA’s Division I council voted 7-2 yesterday to deregulate conference championship football games, meaning a league doesn’t need to have at least 12 teams or divisions to conduct one.

(Aside: Dissenters were the American, of course, and the ACC. The latter is interesting, to me at least, because the ACC had been trying to re-work the rules with regard to divisions. You had to pit division winners against one another in a title game, but clearly the Big 12 wouldn’t have divisions with a 10-team league.

The ACC, we believe, then wondered if there might be a way to better enhance its championship game outside of pitting the Atlantic and Coastal division winners against one another. Perhaps it’s nay vote is irrelevant. Perhaps not.)

So, hey, the Big 12 title game is coming back! It’s not? Well, expansion is tabled for now! That’s not necessarily true, either? What gives?

Let’s begin with the title game. Wednesday’s vote does nothing. It does precede something, but that part we don’t yet know.

The Big 12 has a meeting next month to vote on the matter. It’s not clear how that’s going to turn out, but expect some politicking between now and then. (WVU, I believe, liked yesterday’s outcome, but remember President Gordon Gee is also on the league’s expansion committee.)

The estimates I’ve heard are that a conference title game will fetch between $20-30 million a year, which is a nice slice for the 10 members. But the question will always revert to the obvious: Is it worth it? What if the Big 12 has a playoff team after 12 games and then loses that spot to an upset, or just a loss, in the Big 12 title game?

What’s not clear to me — and others, it turns out — is if the Big 12 would have to play a title game every year.

Put it this way: Why can’t the Big 12 have some flexibility with its title game?

Let’s pretend the 2015 season plays out exactly like 2009, when third-ranked Texas finished the regular season a full two games ahead of the rest of the conference. In this scenario, Texas should be declared the Big 12’s One True Champion at the conclusion of the regular season, and the Longhorns’ next official team function should be a watch party to see which semifinal the committee placed them in. No need to push your conference’s golden goose through the field of barbed wire that a championship game would be.

Now let’s pretend 2015 plays out exactly like 2014. Baylor and TCU ended up tied in the standings, and in effect cancelled out the other’s candidacy for the final seat at the table. Instead of handing out two trophies and hoping for the best, the Big 12 would have been better off pitting them in the rematch, giving the conference its One True Champion – and, most importantly, a win over a Top 6 team that certainly would have pushed the winner past Ohio State and possibly Florida State as well.

In short, if a team wins an outright conference title, it should receive its trophy and have that be that. But in the event of a tie – and only in the event of a tie – the Big 12 should stage a rematch.

Brilliant. Any why not? Everyone’s piled on the Big 12 for how it handled the first season of the playoff and a few people vindicated the league for how the second season unfolded. But if the Big 12 was supposed to learn some sort of lesson from 2014, the events of 2015 notwithstanding, why wouldn’t the league seek to apply that “lesson” now?

Consider the first two years of the playoff: Baylor or TCU was left out last season, Oklahoma made it this season. A Baylor v. TCU game sends the winner to the CFP last season, an Oklahoma v. TCU this season is a risk the Sooners wouldn’t have wanted to take.

Let’s say the exact same scenarios happen the next two years — actually, let’s say in 2017 and 2018, since I doubt the Big 12 will juggle its already-announced schedule to accommodate a 2016 title game. What’s stopping the Big 12 from playing the game in 2017 and not playing the game in 2018?

(It’s bold, but so what? The bigger issue is the television side of things, which that Zach Barnett piece covers, but I have a hard time believing a network wouldn’t want to cover that and the Big 12 couldn’t make some money off of it. It’s what TV and conferences do, after all.)

Now, as for expansion, the message yesterday was that the league no longer has the incentive to expand. On the surface, that makes sense. The Big 12 doesn’t need 12 teams to have a playoff, so why add teams? But I’m not sure I agree with the message, mostly because I don’t for a second believe a conference title game is the incentive to expand. There are other factors to consider, and they trump one extra game in December.

Really, if the vote went against the Big 12, does it rush out and add two members so it can comply with the rules and play a game we’re not convinced it wants to play? I don’t believe so. But similarly, Wednesday’s rule could simply cover the league until it adds members, which is to say when the time is right to add members, which still might be a decade away.