ESPN College Football

Posted by ESPN.com's Tim Griffin

For all of the recent teeth gnashing that went with the Big 12 coaches' approval of their old three-way tiebreaking rules, one fact remains indisputable.

Namely, these three-way deadlocks just don't happen very often.

The Oklahoman's Berry Tramel got out the calculator and the record book and figured that three-way deadlocks have happened 10 times in the 900 conference races in college football history, including divisional races.

That's the not-so-great numeric odds of 1-in-90 in happening once.

So could it happen again?

Not very likely -- even as Texas, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are ranked in many preseason polls among the top six teams nationally.

It would have to reach a perfect storm again where A beats B, B beats C and C beats A in a three-way equation. And that's along with some tough road games at other places before that equation would even play out.

So the chance of a three-way tie are always possible.

But it would mean hitting the chance of barely 1 percent in back-to-back seasons.

I'm not much of a gambler, but I'd be willing to take that bet every day.

And I bet that Big 12 coaches were thinking the same way when they made their decision to keep the status quo.