The Stars Are Bright by Maple Street Press

The Stars Are Bright Conspiracy theories, the Big 12, and the Texas Longhorns by Brandon Vogel

ne of the oldest, most sinister slights in sports was echoing through the halls of the newest, most extravagant football stadium on the planet: conspiracy. Forget the giant scoreboard, the luxury amenities, the glistening glass and steel. Now, we had controversy, accusations of backdoor dealings, and anger. This was football in Texas. Cowboy Stadium was finally getting that broken-in feeling. “The BCS! That’s why they make that call,” Bo Pelini shouted into the mammoth concourses, offering his own answer as to why one second had been placed back on the clock and his Cornhuskers were losers of the Big 12 Championship Game. Moments earlier, Hunter Lawrence had kicked a 46-yard field goal to secure an undefeated season and spot in the BCS National Championship Game for the Texas Longhorns. One long, agonizing, reviewed, and reviled second before that kick—there’s already a Texas mile, shall we call this a Texas

second?—Pelini had walked onto the field, arms raised in triumph. Now, as the Longhorns celebrated another narrow victory over the Huskers, Pelini was rampaging through the halls of the stadium looking for answers from the Big 12 higher-ups. While Bo may have said it was the BCS at work, the real jab was directed at the Big 12. Didn’t the conference have more to gain from a national title game appearance by Texas than a Fiesta Bowl appearance for a 10–3 Nebraska team? Sure. Whether or not that factored into the outcome is a question that will be hotly debated in the state of Nebraska for years to come, but it’s nothing new. Tom Osborne, the man laconically trying—but not as hard as you might expect—to calm Pelini down, saw this coming way back in 1995. When Texas and the three Lone Star starters signed on to form the Big 12, Osborne seemingly knew that the power in the new conference was headed south and what Tom knows may as

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their status as football outlaws. The list of dirty deeds was long and impressive— fixed test results, player slush funds, and, in one case, editing adult film clips into game film to keep the players interested—and it was all mostly wink-winked away until SMU received the infamous “death penalty” that same year. That very public black eye left the Southwest Conference reeling from a public relations standpoint and finally feeling it in their long cowboy wallets. Turns out that it’s tough to negotiate a lucrative television package when you’re never sure how many of your teams will actually be allowed to appear on TV. How far had the SWC fallen? Consider the 1994 season. Texas A&M The loss to Texas in the inaugural Big 12 Championship Game started the year ranked 15th in the counin 1996 still hurts as much today as it did then. try and blew through the schedule undewell be gospel in Nebraska. feated. But, as was nearly customary for the time, the Aggies Now, with Nebraska headed to the Big Ten, it seems like were on probation, meaning no SWC championship and no the perfect time to look back at the history of the Big 12 and bowl game. The conference championship was split five ways address the question of whether Texas was more important to with Texas, Baylor, TCU, Texas Tech, and Rice all finishing 4–3 the conference than the Cornhuskers. in the SWC and unranked in the penultimate AP poll that year. Tech was selected to represent the SWC in the Cotton Bowl THE BEST LITTLE CONFERENCE IN TEXAS because they hadn’t played in the game since 1939. They were (AND ARKANSAS) promptly trounced 55–14 by USC, the seventh straight loss for For pure entertainment value, it’s a shame the Southwest SWC teams in their anchor bowl and further reminder of how Conference had to end. the reputation of the once mighty Cotton Bowl had slid into This was a traditionalist’s conference. A conference of the muck with the rest of the conference. Dallas hadn’t played hand signs, pep rallies, and fight songs worth fighting over. host to a national champion on New Year’s Day since Notre A conference whose member institutions helped build the Dame played the Cotton Bowl in 1977. archetype of the pretty college co-ed. The conference Dan By 1994, the conference was already a dead man walking. Jenkins would’ve dreamt up for a college football novel, if he The Aggies and Longhorns had been looking for a way out had needed to. of the SWC since the late ’80s with Texas A&M hoping This was also a wildcatter’s conference. A conference to follow Arkansas to the SEC while Texas longed for the where eating a worm served as a pep talk and a damp towel, academic prestige of the Big Ten or Pac-10. After years of one for the offense and one for the defense, served as a water false starts and empty promises, the Big Eight, itself looking break. A conference that helped build the archetype of the to expand television revenue, came calling. Conference straight talking, fast dealing, folk hero coach. A conference officials knew they wanted Texas, but they also knew they that was as Texan as a six-pack of Lone Star with an Arkansas needed at least one other team to balance the league. Texas chaser. This was a conference where things regularly got out A&M was the logical choice. Over the decade prior to the of hand and nobody involved really seemed to care. In fact, first season of Big 12 play, the Aggies had compiled a .785 they seemed to like it. winning percentage that ranked them fourth in the country In the SWC of the 1980s, if you weren’t cheating, you and, more importantly, at least in College Station, dwarfed the weren’t trying. During that decade, only Arkansas, Baylor, and Longhorns’ mark of .574 during that same span. Rice escaped some form of probation. The 1986 TCU–SMU So where did Baylor and Texas Tech come in? Never ungame was proudly deemed the “Probation Bowl” with derestimate the value of important alumni. Ann Richards, then students from both institutions sporting T-shirts celebrating governor, and lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, were both

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Photo on previous page: Jamie Squire/Getty Images Photo this page: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

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The Stars Are Bright Baylor graduates. Robert Junell, on his way to becoming chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was a Tech grad. Together, this group of powerful alumni made it known that state funding for A&M and Texas might be particularly tough to come by if their respective schools were left out in the cold. Texas politicians had convinced the Aggies and Longhorns that their gig was up, they convinced the Big Eight as well. On February 24, 1994, the Big Eight officially became the Big 12.

11–1

Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

By the time the SWC played its final season in 1995, the once proud conference hadn’t been home to a consensus national champion since Texas in 1970 and, at least for Nebraska fans, even that title—awarded by the UPI, and Nixon approved, before the Longhorns went out and lost the Cotton Bowl— was one of technicality. The Big Eight, meanwhile, had won three consensus national titles over the previous six years and that was without the benefit of the usually formidable Oklahoma Sooners who, still suffering from the aftermath of the Switzer era, were in the process of rebuilding. The power of the so-called “super-conference” was evident right from the start. The Big 12 had six teams in the AP’s 1996 pre-season top 25: #1 Nebraska, #5 Colorado, #8 Texas, #21 Kansas State, #23 Texas A&M, and #25 Kansas. In the beginning, the Cornhuskers, winners of back-to-back national titles and carrying a nation’s-best 25-game winning streak into the season, were undeniably the class of the conference on the field. In the boardroom, however, Nebraska had already lost a few high profile battles. The first was the issue of conference

Tom Osborne knew that a championship game would make it more difficult for a Big 12 team to make it to the national title game.

headquarters. The Big Eight had called Kansas City home, but almost every school saw the start of the new conference as a chance to secure a little home cooking. Twelve cities submitted bids—Denver, Tulsa, Wichita, Houston, San Antonio, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Colorado Springs, Omaha, Lubbock, Kansas City, and Dallas. The finalists were Kansas City and Dallas with Kansas City submitting a bid worth about $1 million more than Dallas’s offer. By a 7–5 vote, the Big 12 set up shop in Dallas and the home state of the four newcomers. That turned out to be the close race. The issue of academic standards was considerably thornier. Initially, the Big 12 had agreed to adopt the academic standards present in the Big Eight. That meant placing no restrictions on the number of partial or nonqualifiers a school could admit. But the SWC had been operating without any partial or nonqualifiers, and Texas, who had first started conference shopping as a way to polish their already shiny academic reputation, had a change of heart. As the story goes, they were able to convince other schools to push for partial qualifier restrictions. There’s certainly an argument for both sides of the issue when it comes to partial and nonqualifiers. Some say it helps kids get an education, others say it exploits them, but that wasn’t the debate Tom Osborne was having. He viewed the restrictions as a distinct recruiting disadvantage when other conferences, like the scholarly Big Ten, were operating without limitations. Nobody else agreed. The number on the table on December 20, 1995, was two partial qualifiers per school per year, effective immediately. When the votes came back, it was 11–1. The lone dissenting vote was that of Nebraska. How strongly did Osborne feel about the issue? After becoming the first school to win consecutive national titles in 39 years, he used his Fiesta Bowl post-game press conference not to celebrate but to bend reporter’s ears about how the Big 12 was hamstringing itself. “I hope [the Big 12 presidents] will take a look at the fact that the Big Eight has four teams in the top ten,” said Osborne. “We did it with Big Eight rules.” Next up was the vote for a conference championship game. At the time, only the SEC had a title game, instituted after expansion in 1992. In 1994, undefeated Alabama lost the SEC Championship Game and likely a shot at a national title. For a school like Nebraska, that had started most of the past 20 or so seasons with legitimate title hopes, this sounded like a good way to make winning one even more difficult. Again, the votes came back 11–1, but this time the results were almost immediate. A little less than one year later, on December 7, 1996, in the first ever Big 12 Championship Game, #3 Nebraska faced an unranked Texas team as a three touchdown favorite. You know how it went. It was their first meeting as conference foes, but Texas won for what already felt like the third or fourth time.

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WHAT’S BIGGER THAN A SUPERCONFERENCE? Recalling that first conference loss to Texas makes the latest one feel that much worse. Last year the tables were turned, vengeance ripe and ready for picking right in the Longhorns’ backyard. This time it was Texas that had everything to lose and Nebraska was the good but flawed team looking for a springboard back onto the national scene. This was the chance to show the Longhorns why a conference championship game can be good for your bottom line but bad for your boosters. In the end, however, it was just another bureaucratically efficient Texas win. In Big 12 play, Nebraska is 1–8 against the Longhorns, with six of those losses by four points or less. Playing Texas has become like a trip to the DMV. Each time you go you’re sure you’ve got the proper documents and forms and each time they send you away still in need of something else. Nebraska keeps finding more and more spectacular ways to lose to Texas. Sooner Magic has been replaced with the Longhorn Loophole. But, like Oklahoma in the ’80s and the Florida schools in the early ’90s, Nebraska has shown the ability to break through a streak of bad luck. The question now is will they have enough time to do the same against the Longhorns? This past offseason, with teams jumping conferences after months of rampant speculation, was actually quite similar to the college football landscape of the 1990s. Back then the SEC set the wheels in motion by adding South Carolina and Arkansas, splitting into two divisions and adding a conference

Bo Pelini was as irked as any Husker fan about how the Big 12 Championship Game ended last season.

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championship game. The Big 12 and ACC followed suit and now, finally, the Pac-10 and Big Ten are joining the party. With Nebraska moving to the Big Ten starting in 2011 the question is now: Will the diehard Husker fan be happy with the move? This, in turn, is the answer to our original question: Is it really all about Texas? Forget the financial part of it. Forget the nostalgia part of it. Just focus on Texas. Will fans be happy to get out of the conference that’s been viewed by so many Husker fans as under the Longhorns’ thumb? Or, do you see it as a sort of surrender? If you answered yes to the first question then, yes, you probably believe that the Big 12 conference was all about Texas. If you answered yes to the second question then you’re banking on Nebraska, to borrow a phrase, to take what they want. Make no mistake, Texas is any easy target. They have the most money, the best recruiting territory, the prettiest cheerleaders, the Big 12 conference headquarters, and Nebraska’s number. That’s a lot to look past, but remember, those initial conference votes were 11–1. Nebraska was the only school looking for looser academic standards and willing to give up money for a better shot at going undefeated. That sounds worse than it actually was. There were legitimate arguments to be made on Nebraska’s behalf on those issues but, without the support of even one other team, no real way to make them seem anything other than self-serving. In all but the most faithful Nebraska circles, the Huskers lost those public relations battles and that set up a potent us-vs.-them scenario. Texas, as the biggest chip in the pot and the most heartbreakingly frequent Husker tormentor, largely came to represent the “them” all on their own. That, added to Nebraska’s shift to the Big Ten, puts a lot of weight on this year’s game. The Longhorns’ trip to Lincoln has all the makings of the biggest regular season game Nebraska has played since facing Oklahoma in 2001 but with a full ten months of build up. There’s too much history, real and possibly imagined, for it not to. There’s the pride of being the team to win the last match-up as Big 12 foes. That’s a good thing. Hatred is one of the pillars of college football and one Nebraska has all too often been lacking. Despite all the history, the backbiting, the Texas second, it’s still tough to say that the Big 12 was a sinister Texas cabal set on thwarting Nebraska’s football dreams. But this season, the last Big 12 season for Nebraska? Now that is definitely all about Texas. MSP

Brandon Vogel is a freelance writer living in Omaha. His sports writing has been featured on FOXSports.com and MSN.com, and in the past two editions of Cornhusker Kickoff. Brandon writes about the Huskers year round for the Big Red Network.

Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

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