Big 12 Chaos Reading Room: Why Aggies want out and so much more

Whither Texas A&M? Whither Kansas? Whither Texas?

Whither Iowa State?

None of it is Nebraska's problem. The Cornhuskers are on their way to play Minnesota in 2011, for the first time since the Huskers beat the Gophers in 1990 by a tidy score of 56-0.

Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis Star Tribune remembers. Here's an excerpt from this link:

It was what occurred before halftime in the 1990 game -- the one that caused (former Minnesota Athletic Director Dan) Meinert to throw in the wastebasket Nebraska's invitation to schedule another two-game series.

Nebraska was leading 42-0. It was moving toward another touchdown, inside the 20, with one minute remaining. Osborne ordered a couple of kneel-downs from his quarterback to keep the margin at six touchdowns.

Why would Texas A&M want to get away from Texas and run off to a different conference, namely the Southeastern?

Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle has some answers in this column. A passage:

If Texas A&M jumps to the Southeastern Conference, it'll be because the Aggies have had enough of being compared to and defined by the Longhorns.

At least Gene Stallings has had the guts to say - or to hint strongly - what a lot of other Aggies are thinking.

Can you blame him? How would you like to be constantly compared to a football program that sells more tickets and merchandise, raises more money and wins more games than almost any other in the nation?

Please don't write and tell me about golf and tennis. This is about football, and the Aggies aren't competitive. Texas A&M has become The Other School in Texas, and to thousands of A&M fans, to those who contribute millions and care deeply, this is galling.

The Kansas City Star, predictably, had some good weekend stuff on the Big 12. First, here's a piece by Scott Canon illustrating how a Big 12 breakup would damage Kansas City, the University of Missouri, the University of Kansas, and Kansas State University. A sampling:

You need not know the difference between an alley oop and a shotgun formation to appreciate how a Big 12 weekend brings a certain bigger-city buzz of badly dressed out-of-towners wandering through Westport, the Country Club Plaza and, in recent years, downtown.

“If they all go their separate ways, to put it colloquially, Kansas City is screwed,” said William Worley, a Metropolitan Community College instructor and the author of several books on Kansas City history. “Not that we should, but psychologically we'll see ourselves going to even more of a second-class level. … There's a loss of cohesion.”

The Star's Scott Mellinger says Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebe was playing with the deck stacked against him. Mellinger writes:

If the Big 12 dies this week, one of the most frustrating parts will be that it's swallowed by a Pacific-10 Conference that in so many tangible ways is an inferior league.

Both conferences have roughly the same national market share, somewhere around 16 percent. But the Big 12's Central Time Zone is more desirable for TV networks. The Texas recruiting base feeds programs across the country. And the football and basketball have been consistently better - even before the major penalties to Southern California.

Of course, those factors shift dramatically if Texas packs its high profile.

This is where the conflict has always rested, starting from the Big 12's beginning 14 years ago with a shotgun wedding between Texas demanding a bigger share of television money and old Big Eight schools that felt disrespected by it.

The situation was no better by the time Beebe took over. By then, the Big 12's weak network TV deal was already signed and the Big Ten had already started its network.

But this ray of hope came Sunday night in this story from the Star's Scott DeArmond. He wrote:

A source close to Big 12 Conference realignment negotiations has told The Star that chances for the league to stay together are “significantly greater than 24 hours ago.”

The same source said that a new television contract being touted by Commissioner Dan Beebe could produce “significantly more” than $17 million for each of the remaining 10 Big 12 schools. Perhaps upwards of $20 million per school.

And, that a departure penalty of around $20 million withheld from Colorado and Nebraska would mean $2 each to the remaining Big 12 members.

Finally, Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says here that Missouri's appeal could ... grow? ... in the aftermath of a Big 12 disintegration. Says Miklasz:

If the Pac-10 expands to 16, why wouldn't the Big Ten speed up expansion plans and also go to 16? And though the 12-team SEC is a legitimate powerhouse as is, Commissioner Mike Slive isn't the type to be left twisting while others are busily forming 16-member super conferences. And if the Pac-10, Big Ten and SEC are making power moves, the ACC and the Big East won't sleep. They'll mobilize, too.

So if we're really on the eve of the advent of the 16-team super conferences, Missouri's appeal will grow. Mizzou will suddenly look a lot more attractive to commissioners who need to fill out a new lineup card with power hitters and line drive hitters instead of settling for marginal slap hitters.

It's always about baseball in St. Louis.