94 National Championships. 3 in football. 2 in basketball. 800+ individual championships. Plagued with infighting and instability throughout. How did it get to this point? What went so wrong with the arguably the best conference in America from start to finish from 2000-09? It is very easy to single out the Longhorn Network as the cause of the division but in reality, the issues go back much further.
Nebraska chose to depart in 2010 under the notion that the interest of the entire conference was not a top priority. From the onset, their staunch opposition to a conference championship game with met with great resistance from the other schools in the conference. Nebraska felt that hosting a championship game could be damaging to a school that was in contention to play for a national championship. And in the inaugural Big 12 Championship game held in Saint Louis, their nightmare scenario came true as unranked Texas pulled off the stunning upset against #3 Nebraska. From league offices being relocated to Texas to the site of the championship game being moved to Arlington, TX instead of rotating within the northern division region (Kansas City), they felt that Texas was greatly influencing league policies in order to benefit the interests of themselves instead of the conference. Not that they needed further convincing, but the controversial ending to the 2009 Big 12 Championship game was all that Nebraska needed to show in order to convince others that the Big 12 conference belonged to one single school, the University of Texas.
Texas A&M, tired of being in the shadow of instate rival Texas, decided to bolt for the SEC in 2011. The perception had long been that the Texas Longhorns was the Big Brother that was always trying to one-up them. But after the establishment of the Longhorn network, it became crystal clear that if that wasn't the best time for Texas A&M to finally get from under the shadow of “Big Brother Texas” by leaving the Big 12, there would never be a better time for the Aggies. Leaving to join the SEC allowed them to be the only Texas school in the SEC, giving them a chance to finally build their own identity separate of the University of Texas.
Missouri hinted about their interest in joining the Big Ten conference in the latter years of the old Big 8 conference. That interest re-emerged nearly 15 years later as a member of the Big 12. On multiple occasions Missouri fell victim to Big 12 conference rules that allow the Bowl System to select which schools played in their respective bowls instead of by win-loss record and the quality of such. They also didn't feel that inequitable revenue sharing within the conference provided long term stability, especially seeing how successful the Big Ten Network had become with doing so. The strong possibility of the Pac-10 conference adding 6 schools from the Big 12 ( Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State) that would have essentially destroyed the Big 12 and left Missouri looking for another conference to call home. From the doorsteps of the Big Ten to being a member of the Mountain West conference? That was a reality that simply could not happen.
The Longhorn Network may have been the catalyst for so much dissention and dissatisfaction in the Big 12 that led to 4 defections in 2 years. But the inability of then-commissioner Dan Beebe to be the leading voice of reconciliation and stability for the future cannot be understated. And without that voice, the Big 12 fell behind its counterparts (Big Ten, SEC,) never to regain its standing as the best collegiate conference in the land.
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