Bob Bowlsby cannot recall what he scribbled on the outside of the envelope—A bracket? A scenario? A ranking?—but he believes it to be something of significance.
Otherwise, why would he keep it?
The envelope is somewhere, likely buried in a filing cabinet or tucked into a box, alongside other hand-scribbled notes that Bowlsby took during his two years of meetings as a member of the College Football Playoff working group—the one that explored and eventually proposed an expansion of the four-team playoff to 12.
Bowlsby, the Big 12 commissioner, is preserving these precious, historic documents to one day, years from now, unearth them in a dramatic way, as evidence of a process that will likely result in a sea change in college athletics.