Miner Rush, a UTEP Miners community

When you are a major sports conference for that long, you will create a lot of great moments. It’s just natural. And the Big Eight had its share. There was the Game of the Century, the classic football game between Oklahoma and Nebraska in 1971. There was the NCAA basketball championship game in Kansas City — the home of the Big Eight for all those years — between Oklahoma and Kansas. There was the fourth down game between Colorado and Missouri — classic in its own way. Oklahoma football won 47 games in a row. Jim Ryun and his Kansas teammates set world records in track. It’s always hard to say where things were INVENTED, but the NBA’s Triangle Offense was more or less perfected at Kansas State when Tex Winter coached there, and the football option play was more or less perfected at Nebraska and Oklahoma, and big time basketball recruiting was taken to a new level when Kansas recruited Wilt Chamberlain. And so on.

But, sadly, great moments are not why college conferences are put together. Rivalries are not why conferences are put together. Innovation, history, passion, tradition, cohesion, education — none of these are why conferences are put together. Oh, sure, it is nice to have all those things. Everybody wants those things. But in the end, conferences are like most other things. They are about maximizing revenue. It’s expensive to run an athletic department. It’s expensive to run a college. And the pressure to win sends the costs skyward. There’s an intense pressure to keep up, and to keep up you always need money, more money, even more money. For years, that meant teaming up with those schools who could excite the fan base and help draw the biggest crowds to football games (and, to a lesser extent, basketball games). Then, television came along and changed the formula.