AUSTIN, Texas — College football fans in the state of Texas making plans to attend what could be a game with both Big 12 championship and College Football Playoff implications at stake on Nov. 23 when 22nd-ranked Texas travels north on IH-35 to take on 12th-ranked Baylor will have to wait another week for a kickoff time to be set. The Big 12’s television partners at ESPN and FOX have opted to exercise the six-day selection window, the league announced Monday.

The 109th meeting between the Longhorns and Bears could be one of the most important in the history of the series, which is why FOX is keeping the option open to carry the game at 7 p.m. either nationally on FOX or FS1. If the regular season's penultimate game for both squads isn’t a prime-time contest, they’ll meet at Waco’s McLane Stadium in a 2:30 p.m. affair airing on FS1.

Two games next weekend have been flexed by the conference’s television partners: the tilt between Texas (6-3, 4-2 Big 12) and Baylor (9-0, 6-0) and TCU’s (4-5, 2-4) road trip to 10th-ranked Oklahoma (8-1, 5-1). The announcement of the kickoff times for both games is expected to be on Nov. 17.

That’s one day after a huge Saturday for both programs. While the Bears will host the Sooners with first place in the Big 12 standings (and the inside track for a berth in the Big 12 title game) on the line, the Longhorns will hit the road to meet an Iowa State (5-4, 3-3) squad coming off of a one-point road loss to the Sooners over the weekend, 42-41.

A loss to the Cyclones in Ames means the Longhorns would need a lot of help to make it to AT&T Stadium. Should head coach Tom Herman lead his crew into Jack Trice Stadium and emerge victorious, however, a win over Baylor combined with Oklahoma defeating the Bears and the Longhorns knocking off Texas Tech on Black Friday in the regular-season finale would give Herman’s charges the tiebreaker over Matt Rhule and Co. in the league standings.

Thickening the plot is the scenario of Baylor beating Oklahoma, which would make the Bears the Big 12’s lone remaining hope to avoid being left out of the CFP for the third time since the four-team playoff became the tool used to decide college football’s national champion in 2014. Baylor slipped one spot in the Associated Press Top 25 after a 29-24 triple-overtime road win over TCU, so the Bears winning out could put to the test how much the CFP Selection Committee would truly value a one-loss Power Five conference champion.

Regardless, for the Longhorns, the matter at hand is making sure a run of success when facing Matt Campbell’s Cyclones continues in order for the season to have a chance of going down as one to remember. A 17-7 victory in Ames in Herman’s first conference game leading the Longhorns in 2017 was followed by a 24-10 thumping of Iowa State by Texas in a game last season featuring a pair of top-25 teams with conference championship aspirations.

No matter the conference title scenarios, winning out would give the Longhorns only the program’s second regular season of nine or more victories since 2009, a feat the 2018 squad achieved with a 9-3 finish. To do that, Texas will need to build on a 27-24 win over Kansas State where the defense got critical stops down the stretch to put the ball in the hands of quarterback Sam Ehlinger, who engineered a 13-play, 67-yard drive to end the game with a 26-yard field goal by Cameron Dicker at the gun.

Prior to the K-State game, Herman talked repeatedly about how the Longhorns were on the ropes and needed to respond. To beat Iowa State, Herman said Monday during his weekly press conference, Texas needs to continue to play with the sense of urgency and grit showed when rallying from a 14-0 deficit to beat a K-State club that entered the game No. 16 in the initial CFP rankings.

“Part of being on the ropes is you don't get off of them with one game, just one win,” Herman said. “But to beat a top-25 team the way that we did in terms of holding them to 51 yards rushing, us rushing for 214 yards and getting the ball back with 6:45 on the clock and ending the game with double zeros (on the clock) and a win showed a lot of fortitude by our players.

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“That being said, we’ve gotta move on,” he added. “We've got another road test against a very good, well-coached, experienced Iowa State team that, they probably feel like their backs are against the wall a little bit, too.

“We're gonna have to prepare even better this week than we did last week.”