The Big XII football conference has seen better days. Oklahoma has had an impressive season, but it has as much to do with low expectations rather than a truly dominant team. Texas was looking good for a while, but they were really never of national championship caliber even when they had only lost to #1 Ohio State. But Texas and Oklahoma are the top teams in the conference, and besides that they are in the stronger South division. The bigger problem with the Big XII is the north division.

Nebraska lost unimpressively to Oklahoma in the conference's championship game and in the last four championship games the teams from the South have outscored the teams from the north by a whopping 163-16 margin. The champions of the lowly Sun Belt Conference could hardly do worse than the champions of the Big XII North. There is a natural ebb and flow to the strength of the teams of some schools and conferences and divisions. It's possible that a few years from now we will be lamenting the weakness of the Big XII South relative to that of its northern counterpart.

However, I don't believe that this is the case. I believe that the Big XII North has structural disadvantages that will likely keep it from dominance. Football teams aren't made of corn-fed midwestern or rural kids that are aching to get the chance to go to college in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Ames, Iowa. Rural schools are a tough sell, as are predominantly white, midwestern states. That creates a problem for Nebraska, Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State. Colorado and Missouri avoid that particular fate, but the former is in a state more focused on professional football and the latter is a basketball school.

None of these problems are insurmountable. NU football is about the only thing going on in Nebraska so they continue to draw 80,000 fans a game. Missouri and Colorado are in populous and demographically varied states. Kansas State has beaten the odds before and they could do it again. My thoughts here are under the assumption that the Big XII North schools do not rebound and that the disparity continues to be a problem.

There has been talk in some circles about doing away with the divisions and the conference championship game. The most vocal proponent is OU coach Bob Stoops, who nearly lost his chance at the national championship game because they slipped up and lost decisively against K-State in 2002. A lot of coaches in the Big XII South believe that the conference game hurts more than helps because it's a game that doesn't reward them when they win but punishes them when they lose. I don't particularly agree with this point-of-view (The Big XII North is weak and when you win it does help in the human polls), but doing away with divisions is the natural precursor to a much larger development: the dissolution of the Big XII.

Getting rid of the championship games would solve none of the problems of the Big XII North and would in fact exacerbate them. Right now each team only plays half the teams of the opposing conference, so the schedule of the South division would likely weaken and the north teams will start losing more games and at least three or four will be huddled around the bottom of the conference standings in any given year. Eventually, the Big XII South schools will start to ask why they are separating their money 12 ways when it's only half of those schools generating the national exposure and revenue.

Worse yet, five of the name schools are located in neighboring states (Texas and Oklahoma) and in an especially good position to consider other options. Worse yet, three of those schools (Texas, A&M, and Tech) have a very short history with the north division and along with Oklahoma schools carry the conference's largest and most passionate markets (though Missouri and Colorado do have large markets and Nebraska has a couple passionate ones, neither has both). The more I examine it, the less sure I am that even having a conference championship compensates for the North's deficiencies.

So the question is... what can they do about it? Where can they go?

To be continued...