For the second straight season, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State will settle the Big 12 football championship in the final game of the regular season.

If the Big 12 had a conference title game, the Sooners and Cowboys would have then faced off in an immediate rematch.

Next year, the situation will not just be a hypothetical. The Big 12 championship game is returning after being on hiatus since 2010. The top two teams in the standings will meet at AT&T Stadium next season with a league championship and what the Big 12 hopes is more on the line.

With that alignment, the possibility of an Oklahoma-Oklahoma State type rematch becomes very real, and the Big 12's options to prevent it are fairly limited and involve guesswork more than anything else.

"You tell me who's going to be at the top of the standings," Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in a phone interview Thursday, "and I'll tell you how to avoid it."

The Big 12 schedule for 2017 hasn't been released. Bowlsby said conference athletic directors will discuss it early next week at meetings in New York.

While some rivalry games have a fixed window on the schedule -- like Texas-OU during the State Fair of Texas -- others could be adjusted.

"Nothing says a rivalry game has to be the last game of the season," Bowlsby said.

Going back decades, Oklahoma-Oklahoma State has been played in early November or even October, back in the Big Eight days when the Sooners' meeting with Nebraska headlined the end of the season.

Big 12 coaches offered a "mixed bag" of opinions about whether to use a two-division setup to determine the title game matchup like the other "power five conferences," Bowlsby said.

The division setup was reflected on during the coaches' teleconference this week.

Oklahoma State's Mike Gundy said he backed the division concept to avoid the immediate rematch possibility.

TCU coach Gary Patterson endorsed the idea of the top two teams making the championship game. Patterson noted that TCU was penalized in 2014 by the lack of a Big 12 title game.

"The bottom line is the reason to have it is to get a team into the national playoffs," Patterson said.

Eventually, conference athletic directors decided on maximizing the conference's chance for the CFP after about a year of discussion and internal debate. There was another factor, Bowlsby said.

It also leads to a better product. With divisions, a top-five ranked team can face an 8-4 team. Bowlsby noted that Ohio State and Michigan are the two top-ranked teams in the Big Ten but neither are in this week's championship game.

"I think that game is more valuable when you take it to the marketplace and market it to fans and TV viewers," Bowlsby said. "It's a big game. The opportunity for No. 1 vs. No. 2 [in conference standings] has been few and far between."

If it's a recent rematch, Bowlsby said it isn't catastrophic. With the Big 12 keeping its round-robin schedule, the title game will be a rematch every year. The only question is timing.

"I don't consider it a big deal and I don't think our TV partners [ESPN and Fox] think it's a big deal," Bowlsby said. "Is it ideal? No. But it would be a pretty exciting week."

Twitter: @ChuckCarltonDMN