[KChiefs1]

Great piece by Joe Posnanski on the demise of the old Big Eight foes of MU, KU & NU:

http://joeposnanski.si.com/2010/06/10/the-big-zero/

First, a quick review.

The Big Eight Conference was started by four universities in 1907 — Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and, this may surprise you, Washington University in St. Louis.

Of course, they didn’t call it the Big Eight Conference then. They called it the Big Five — five because Iowa was simultaneously part of this conference and the conference that would become the Big Ten.

Just a year later, two more schools joined in (Drake and Iowa State) and people called it the Big Seven Conference.

Iowa decided it really needed to pick one conference and chose the future Big Ten in 1911.

So it became the Big Six Conference.

Kansas State joined in 1913, making it the Big Seven again.

Nebraska left for a couple of years — apparently wanted to explore the world, find itself — but Grinnell College jumped on in so the conference was still called the Big Seven.

Then Oklahoma joined in making it the Big Eight for the first time.

Nebraska came back refreshed, and it was the Big Nine.

Oklahoma A&M — later to be Oklahoma State– came in for a three years, making it the Big Ten — but not the real Big Ten.

That couldn’t last.

Then in 1928, Washington, Grinnell, Drake and Oklahoma A&M all bolted to start the Missouri Valley Conference. And days later, the NCAA basketball selection committee spurned the conference by taking a 17-win Virginia team over the MVC regular-season champ, leading Dick Vitale and Billy Packer to praise the committee for its insight. OK, no, that didn’t happen — not for many years, anyway.

That left six teams in the conference, and it would be called, somewhat feebly, the Big Six Conference for 30 years.

Big Six.

Leaves you kind of cold, doesn’t it?

It really doesn’t seem like a conference can be all that big with six teams in it. But apparently they did not want to cede the “Big” adjective to the Big Ten, though in retrospect it would have been kind of cool if they would have called themselves “The Mighty Six” or the “The Magnificent Six” or “The Ginormous Six.” Whatever the name, rivalries built up in those 30 years. Nebraska and Oklahoma fans learned to despise each other (“Your state is so … kind of … like our state!”). Kansas and Missouri fans had long before learned to despise each other; that rivalry going back to before the Civil War. Kansas State and Iowa State brought some Midwestern toughness through the Dust Bowl years.

Conferences were built for convenience and for money — that has never changed — but the Big Six schools seemed to fit together, there was a cohesion of spirit and similarity of purpose.

In 1948, Colorado jumped into the conference, and it was called the Big Seven. In 1958, Oklahoma State came back … and it was the Big Eight Conference for 38 more years.

When you are a major sports conference for that long, you will create a lot of great moments. It’s just natural. And the Big Eight had its share.

There was the Game of the Century, the classic football game between Oklahoma and Nebraska in 1971. There was the NCAA basketball championship game in Kansas City — the home of the Big Eight for all those years — between Oklahoma and Kansas. There was the fifth down game between Colorado and Missouri — classic in its own way. Oklahoma football won 47 games in a row. Jim Ryun and his Kansas teammates set world records in track. It’s always hard to say where things were INVENTED, but the NBA’s Triangle Offense was more or less perfected at Kansas State when Tex Winter coached there, and the football option play was more or less perfected at Nebraska and Oklahoma, and big-time basketball recruiting was taken to a new level when Kansas recruited Wilt Chamberlain.

And so on.

But, sadly, great moments are not why college conferences are put together. Rivalries are not why conferences are put together. Innovation, history, passion, tradition, cohesion, education — none of these are why conferences are put together. Oh, sure, it is nice to have all those things. Everybody wants those things. But in the end, conferences are like most other things. They are about maximizing revenue. It’s expensive to run an athletic department. It’s expensive to run a college. And the pressure to win sends the costs skyward. There’s an intense pressure to keep up, and to keep up you always need money, more money, even more money. For years, that meant teaming up with those schools who could excite the fan base and help draw the biggest crowds to football games (and, to a lesser extent, basketball games). Then, television came along and changed the formula.

The Big Eight Conference officially became the Big 12 Conference in 1996.

There was a feeling among Big Eight leaders — and also the leaders of the old Southwest Conference — that the old way just didn’t work anymore.

This was especially apparent to the Southwest Conference people; they were facing an immediate and crushing crisis. The long history of the Southwest Conference is not so different from the Big Eight; for many years there were nine schools (eight of them in Texas), and they played great football and built great rivalries and gave the country numerous sports innovations such as the wishbone. But in the 1980s, the conference developed this reputation as a renegade place where boosters in tall cowboy hats bought Cadillacs for every high school football star within 500 miles. SMU was smacked with the death penalty in 1987.

Arkansas — the only non-Texas school in the conference — bolted for the SEC in 1991.

Something had to give and everybody knew it. The Southwest Conference was not going to make it.

The Big Eight, though, was not in the same sort of immediate trouble.

The Big Eight people instead were looking down the road. How long could the conference compete for dollars with the SEC and Big Ten and Pac-10 and all those? They didn’t know. Television revenue is everything in sports, and while Nebraska was football-dominant and Oklahoma was still Oklahoma, well, there aren’t that many television sets in Nebraska or Oklalhoma. Or Kansas. Or Iowa. Not one of those states, even now, has four million people in it. Missouri provided an in to the St. Louis market, and Colorado offered Denver, and Kansas-Missouri more or less split Kansas City, but that was pretty much it for even relatively major television markets.

And, let’s face it, none of those are a Top 10 market.

The SEC has Atlanta.

The Big 10 has Chicago and Detroit.

The Pac-10 has Los Angeles.

The Big East was put together, in many ways, to get on the television sets of Washington and New York and Boston and Philadelphia. You can oversimplify things, of course, because there are always multiple reasons for things.

But the Big Eight needed televisions.

And the drowning Southwest Conference offered television sets. In particular, Texas offered television sets. Dallas is the No. 7 television market in America. Houston is the No. 10 television market in America.

Yes, Texas was a prize for any conference. And so, after many closed-door negotiations, the Big Eight invited Texas and three others — Baylor, Texas Tech and Texas A&M — to join. Or anyway, that was the headline:

“Big Eight Expands Into Big 12.”

Only, it probably wasn’t really like that. The Big Eight offices — in Kansas City since 1907 — shut their doors and moved to Dallas. The first Big 12 commissioner — Steve Hatchell — was more or less hand picked by Texas.

This wasn’t the case of the Big Eight expanding. There was no more Big Eight anymore. The conference was built for television sets. And Texas had the most television sets. An uneasy truce began.

Texas found its groove again while in the Big 12. Sports at Texas had been sagging a bit. But under the Big 12 umbrella, Texas football dominated again and the entire athletic department grew and prospered. Other schools had their surges. Kansas State football, under the watchful eye of Bill Snyder, pulled off the greatest turnaround in college football history and in 1998 was a fumble away from the national championship game. Oklahoma football, in the wilderness for a little while, regained its power. Missouri and Kansas played a titanic game for the No. 1 spot in the rankings. Baylor’s women’s basketball team won a national title. Kansas won its first national basketball title since the crescendo of Big Eight basketball in 1988. And all that.

But the conference has never felt like a conference. It has always felt like two conferences — North and South — and there was always a lot of resentment between the two. The North teams have long felt, not without reason, that the conference was being controlled by Texas. The South teams have long felt, not without reason, that the North teams were holding them back. Such are the politics of the Super Conference.

Of course, North-South tensions are just another by-product of the biggest factor. The biggest factor is money — and the simple truth is that even with all those Texas television sets, there’s simply more television money to be made per school in the Big Ten and Pac-10 and SEC. The latest numbers indicate that Big 12 schools made $8-to-$12 million this year in television money. The Big Ten will pay its schools closer to $20 million.

The Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe has been doing his best George Bailey in the Building & Loan speech — running around from school to school, promising a better television deal, asking everyone to just tighten their belts and hang in there, because better days are coming (“Aw, Tom, just enough to tide you over ’til the bank reopens!”). It’s no wonder that time ran out on that pipe dream. A few months ago, the first rumors began of Missouri going to the Big Ten. Then, the rumors changed course and suddenly it seemed that the Big Ten might want Missouri but it REALLY wanted Nebraska. And then the Pac-10 began courting Texas and whoever the Longhorns wanted to bring along for the ride.

And now, it looks like we can pull up a chair and watch the Big 12 implode.

Colorado has already run off to join the Pac-10. Nebraska could join the Big Ten as early as Friday. Texas and its merry band of schools figure to bolt soon after that. Missouri officials will wait impatiently by the phone.

And the Big 12, after only a few years of uneasy competition, will join the Big Eight in the ether of dead sports conferences.

It’s strange to say that greed is what will kill the Big 12 since, after all, it was greed that built the Big 12 in the first place. Greed has always helped shape our sports landscape and I suppose it always will. And, so, there are winners and losers.

Nebraska will be a big winner.

Texas, no doubt, will be a big winner.

And then there will be losers — there’s a lot of talk around my parts about the potentially orphaned programs, particularly Kansas, and what will happen to them. I don’t know. Kansas basketball is obviously one of the greatest college sports programs in America. But football drives revenue. Television drives revenue. And history doesn’t pay the bills. Kansas — like Kansas State and Iowa State, and Missouri is not out of the woods yet — will have to fight for its place in the landscape.

That place could be in a much smaller conference. Sure, there will be losers here. There will be heartbroken fans.

There were those things when the Southwest Conference broke up too. This isn’t new — you can go back 100 years and see schools leaving conferences and getting dumped out of conferences. But, somehow, this feels new. I remember the first year of the Big 12 and the pride of the leaders who really thought they were discovering new lands and building the sports conference of the future.

The irony is: They might have been right.

They did invent a conference of the future.

Trouble is, the future waits for no one.