No celebration cake was cut two weeks ago when major players involved in Big 12 sports gathered for the annual meetings. No toasts or speeches given. No gifts made from tin, traditional for a 10-year anniversary.
A small group of football coaches gathered for a pre-dinner drink on the patio bar. A few more football coaches pulled up chairs, then some women’s basketball coaches. Meetings ended for athletic directors and men’s basketball coaches, and here they came.
Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach sat at the same table as Iowa State women’s basketball coach Bill Fennelly. Oklahoma’s Sherri Coale chatted with Missouri’s Gary Pinkel. They laughed and marveled at the spectacular scenery in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.
Ten years ago, with an entire conference and half of another coming together to start anew in the uncertain future of college athletics, this moment might not have been possible.
“Ten years ago we were hopeful this thing would work,” said Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, formerly at Missouri. “I think we’ve grown up pretty well.”
Here’s how well the Big 12 has grown: On the final day of the meetings, commissioner Kevin Weiberg had to explain why a second straight triple-digit windfall — $102.5 million mostly from television contracts and bowl revenue to sprinkle among the members — came in a few dollars short of last year’s $105 million.
The output brings the 10-year total from the league office to $807 million, and the profits annually rank the Big 12 with the major players of college sports, which was the whole idea in the first place.
“I’d say forming the Big 12 was the right thing do to,” said Texas A&M athletic director Bill Byrne, who was at Nebraska when the league launched.
What has the Big 12 accomplished? Greater television exposure, a bowl game for every team that qualifies, a championship football contest, the expansion of women’s sports, a facility construction boom nearing $1 billion on collective campuses — not to mention the inspiration for Kansas City’s new downtown arena.
“You think that happens without a Big 12?” Castiglione asked.
To make the Big 12 work, the athletic directors decided to close the book on the Big Eight after 89 years. The less-stable Southwest Conference ceased operations after 82 years.
For the Big Eight, which placed four teams in football’s final top 10 in 1995, this was a difficult pill to swallow.
“The original thought was the Southwest schools were going to join us,” former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne said. “At least that’s how it was presented to the coaches.”
But the coaches from the Big Eight weren’t in the same conference rooms as presidents and athletic directors.
“Our sense was we were building from square one, and that this should be a new conference with new rules,” said former Colorado chancellor and faculty chairman for athletics Jim Corbridge.
Besides, the Big Eight wasn’t going to thrive on its own.
“The Southwest Conference was not in good shape,” Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds said. “But when you stacked up the Big Eight against the SEC, the Big Ten and the Pac-10, they were behind them.”
That was the one idea on which most seemed to agree. A fundamental shift in college sports financing was under way, and conferences, not a central organization such as the NCAA or College Football Association, would negotiate their own television contracts.
And the more powerful the conference, the better the contract.
“You changed or got left behind,” Byrne said.
Schools changed leagues monthly, or so it seemed, as the notion of “super conferences” caught fire. Arkansas and South Carolina to the Southeastern Conference. Penn State to the Big Ten. Florida State to the ACC. The formation of a Big East football conference, which would include Miami, Virginia Tech, Syracuse, Boston College and West Virginia.
“There was a frantic nature to all of it,” said Steve Hatchell, then the Southwest Conference commissioner who would become the Big 12’s boss.
One move stood above all. When Notre Dame struck its own television deal with NBC in 1991, the College Football Association’s days were numbered. The CFA was a group of powerful schools formed in 1979 that claimed it owned their TV rights and negotiated the contracts for all conferences except the Big Ten and Pac-10.
The CFA now was wobbling. The knockout blow came two years later. CBS had lost the NFL to Fox, needed sports inventory, and signed the SEC. For the first time, a conference had taken financial responsibility for its members.
“All of this made the Big 12 necessary,” Hatchell said. “You were either going to be a player in this or get eaten up.”
The Big Eight was in. But who from the Southwest Conference would join?
The 16 athletic directors from the conferences had met as early as 1991 to discuss their collective strength as a scheduling alliance. The early talks focused on keeping conference identities but selling themselves as one television package. Except Texas and Texas A&M had other ideas. Texas had talked to the Pac-10, then the Big Ten. The SEC let known it was interested in Texas and A&M.
But the right fit for both was the Big Eight, a major football conference. Hatchell and Dodds actually worked together in the old Big Eight office, and the Longhorns felt ties with the league because of its rivalry with Oklahoma.
