As noted earlier here, the Big 12 Conference was formed as a money grab rather than because of any meaningful allegiances between most of the conference members. And, as noted here, football programs of the institutions in the Big 12 North Division have a difficult time competing with their better-funded and located (at least in terms of attracting good football players) brethen in the Big 12 South Division.
Well, Mark Kiszla of the Denver Post has been noticing the same thing. In this column entitled Divided, Big 12 bound to fall, he observes that the Big 12 is a poorly-structured alliance of convenience based almost entirely on money. As such, Kiszla predicts that the conference is destined to fail:
A football conference divided cannot stand.
There’s a feud in the Big 12 Conference between the North and South. It’s a civil war in which nobody wins and Colorado too often loses.
This league – held together by little except greed and a championship game that’s regularly as flat as a too-long-open can of Dr Pepper – is a clash of cultures as different as the Birkenstocks in Boulder and the ten-gallon hats of Texas.
In a conference in which the haves and have-nots are divided by geography, what has gone wrong? [. . .]
Can’t we all get along here?
I’m afraid not.
For a league in which almost half the football teams have trouble putting up a good fight, there’s way too much bad blood.
The Big 12 is a conference split by a Red River of tears, as the bullies from the south have won 13 of 16 games this season against the 98-pound weaklings from the northern plains.
Although the Big 12 boasts of three squads ranked among the top 25 (Longhorns, Sooners, Aggies), you again hear barely any noise from the north, other than the wind blowing through towns from Lawrence, Kan., to Ames, Iowa, as the Jayhawks and Cyclones get blown away by real football teams.
If something does not change, the Big 12 will be slowly ripped asunder, and I fear as the imbalance of power grows worse, the league as we know it will not exist 10 years down the road.
Just another example of the pressures arising from the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots in big-time minor league — er, I mean — college football.
Here we go again with the annual conference football parity whine-fest. It’s an event celebrated throughout the land – from Bloomington to Durham to Tucson.
Competitiveness in college sports goes in cycles, which is a good thing. Yes, the Big XII South has administered a serial whooping on the North – this year. However, I remember that it wasn’t too long ago that Colorado was putting the wood to a pretty good t.u. team in the Big XII championship game; I also recall that quite recently we saw Kansas State, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa State all playing in bowl games. So now that CU has a new coach, and has gone through a rebuilding year, we need to contemplate blowing the league up? The issues to be addressed in large-time college football are more serious than worrying about the year-to-year ebbs and flows in teams’ relative strength.
By the way, the college towns mentioned at the beginning of this reply do quite well every year in their respective conferences – during basketball season.
This is a subject that I’ve actually been putting a lot of thought in to and when I get back from my hiatus plan to post on.
Though it seemed like it might be temporary or a fluke, the disparity between the Big 12 North and Big 12 South is quite structural and I don’t see it changing. Schools like Nebraska don’t have the built in advantage that they once did.
A Denver writer ought to be careful about supporting getting rid of the conference championship game, though. If there’s no championship, there’s no reason for the big players to divide the loot 12 ways instead of 8. Further, moving away from division play would weaken the schedules of the B12S teams that mostly play their stronger division rivals.
A MWC-style break-off would not be out of the question, particularly if they could pick off some SEC schools. Such a configuration could, though would not necessarily, leave CU in the Mountain West Conference (or some new conference with B12N and MWC teams).
Incidentally, related to your ISU post, they are by far the most vulnerable in case of a breakup and could land in the MAC. Anyway, full post coming up in the first week of December upon my return.
One comment on this bit at the end:
“Coloradans, who have 1,001 wonderful ways to enjoy an autumn afternoon, are stuck with annual games against Iowa State, Kansas State and Kansas, which is like asking folks to buy tickets to watch wheat grow.”
Um, all those schools were conference mates in the old Big Eight. Have those games always been boring to him, or are they only so now?
I don’t disagree with his main thesis, but I don’t see what he’s getting at here.