Big 12 Media Days: Monday takeaways

MORE: Power Five commits from July 10-16

FRISCO, Texas -- Without talk about expansion to contend with this year, a championship game decided on and Baylor head coach Matt Rhule not scheduled to appear until tomorrow, there weren't an abundance of hot-button issues to address during the first of Big 12 Media Days.

In fact, for all of the changes and additions coming to the conference this upcoming season, the most discussed topic of conversation was the absence of long-time Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops.

Commissioner Bob Bowlsby started the day giving the obligatory state of the conference address but, before opening the floor to questions, he recounted his most recent exchange with Stoops as the two were both in attendance at a memorial service last weekend.

“I had the opportunity to tell him how much I appreciated his work in the last five years that I have been around on behalf of the sport of football,” Bowlsby said. “He has been a real leader among our coaches. He has been a voice of moderation. He has been a voice for change … The Big 12 is poorer for not having Bob Stoops any longer as a coach in our league.”

Bowlsby spent a fair amount of time Monday morning discussing changes to the recruiting calendar expressed support for opening things up even more.

“The early visits, the early signing dates are substantial changes and I would suggest that we still have a lot of work to do there,” he said. “We have data that indicates about 70-percent of the Division I football prospects make their decision before the first of October and would like to get the recruiting process over with.”

On the heels of that, Bowlsby also floated the idea of adding an even earlier signing ‘window’ that would give prospects an even earlier opportunity to wrap up the recruiting process. That, in addition to new opportunities for prospects to take official visits in the spring months preceding their senior seasons, was something that was met with some criticism from Patterson.

“What I worry about is us not being able to evaluate,” he said. “If he was talking about all the way up in August or September, I’m not sure that’s fair to anybody. I think you’d have to change a lot of other rules but obviously they didn’t ask me, or we would not have put that rule in effect that we have right now.”

Patterson was in full support of the addition of the Dec. 20 signing date, but said that he was blindsided with the news of added official visit window, which now runs from April 1 to late June. Conversely, Kansas head coach David Beatty stands to be one of the coaches that figures to capitalize on getting prospects signed as soon as possible, as he continues to try and rebuild the Jayhawks program.

As things stand now, Kansas already has one five-star recruit in Devonta Jason and one four-star in Corione Harris committed in 2018.

“We hope we can take advantage,” he said. “Right now I think there are still so many unknowns with it because it is so new - I think it’s going to take everyone a year or two to understand the best way to manage it - I would think for us, it would give us an opportunity to lock guys in and narrow-down who we really need to focus on for those last two months, and for me, I really like that idea.

“I’m one of those guys that thinks you’re either committed or you’re not, and if you are, you’ll sign that paper.”

Say what you want to about the job Kliff Kingsbury has done at Texas Tech but one thing remains certain: He won’t be out-dressed. The Red Raiders' head coach has a reputation for looking sharp in slim-fitting suits wherever he goes, and fielded questions after his time on the main stage as to which designer he wore to the afternoon’s event.

A year ago, he also gave one of the more dry pressers among the league's coaches, but he was in a lighter mood this year, joking about the Justin Bieber song that played prior to his introduction, among other things.

College fans have seen what Tech has done offensively with Kingsbury at the helm, prompting one reporter to ask him if he thought he’d see the day some team would score 100 points in a game, to which he thought not. However, despite peppering him with questions about his program’s issues defensively in the past few years, reporters missed an opportunity to ask what he would do if the Red Raiders allowed 99 points in a game this season.

It’s not unusual for experienced FBS quarterbacks to transfer in search of a fresh opportunity with a new program. Joel Lanning’s decision to stay on at Iowa State and switch positions, to linebacker, is a far more uncommon decision.

Lanning will be the first to admit that he still has a lot of room for improvement, but he never considered playing for anyone other than the Cyclones.

“Right after the season [head coach Matt Campbell] called me into his office because he knew what I was thinking; like am I gonna play?” Lanning said. “I didn’t want to come back for my senior year and just stand on the sideline. There was no conversation about linebacker or anything right after the season, but right before spring ball started we had some guys leave the team at the linebacker position and asked me if I wanted to play (middle linebacker) and I said sure.”

Such a dramatic switch at this point of a player's career doesn’t come seamlessly, but Campbell has been impressed with what Lanning was able to do during spring practice.

“I probably was taken back a little bit with just how much growth he was able to make through practice 1 to 15,” Campbell said. “I do think, playing where he played, he really has an understanding about playing at that depth from where he played on the offensive side, but now it’s just a different mentality.”

No doubt there will continue to be a learning curve through the fall, but there is a definite feeling of optimism with the transition.

“Grading myself out from the spring, I would give myself like a B-plus or a C-minus,” Lanning said. “Towards the end of the spring I really started figuring it out; playing fast and not thinking, just reacting. I felt great at the end of the spring, I’m just very anxious to get back out there and play my first game as a linebacker.”

Monday's session in Frisco included a little back-and-forth regarding the return of the Big 12 Championship Game, which hasn't been played since the league moved to a round-robin schedule format in 2011.

When it comes to the motivations and true benefit of the championship game Bowlsby has some things to answer for - the first of which being the possible timing of two teams playing each other in consecutive games at the end of the season.

“I think we need to strike a balance in terms of trying to have a fair schedule and being able to mitigate the likelihood of that, although I don’t think it’s a negative,” he said. “I think it’s important that our best teams are the two that contest in the championship game. That gives us the best springboard (to the College Football Playoff).”

Patterson again had a different perspective when it came to the title game's relevance when it came to the College Football Playoff, but only in the sense that he felt the Big 12 was short-changed without it when it shouldn’t have been.

“To me, the Big 12 should have had teams two out of three times in the playoffs the last couple of years,” he said. “I was told, and Baylor was told, that you had to play a championship game to play an extra game to get into (the playoffs) and then Ohio State got in without having to play in their Big Ten Championship Game.

Bowlsby's stance was that the addition of a 13th data point gives the conference a better chance of representation in the College Football Playoff.

“The decision was made 100-percent based upon our ability to compete at a national level,” he said. “We relied in large measure on our intuition and some data we saw that indicated that playing a championship game, and having that 13th data point would, in fact, deliver that advantage.”