So you may have noticed that Texas A&M University notified the Big 12 Conference that it plans to join with another athletic team conference as of July 2012.
I cannot even begin to contemplate the idea of considering the option that this matters.
There are many reasons. For one, my truck is older than the Big 12. There is no storied legacy. There are no traditions steeped in years of repetition, no bridges between the eras built when children of the digital age reignite flames first lit by children of the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Summer of Love, the Disco Era, or even MTV. The lifetime of every single student on a Big 12 campus -- barring the odd 6th-grade super-genius or two, and they're probably at MIT -- encompasses the entire history of the Big 12, whether you date from the 1996 start of competition or the official formation announcement in 1994.
For another, the Big 12 has always carried an air of artificiality to go with its shallow draft in the sea of years. It's all of the Big Eight Conference (89-year history) plus four Texas schools from the old Southwest Conference (82-year history). Both of those older conferences had several different lineups and realignments under their belts, but they consciously kept the strand of continuity between their current incarnations and the historic ones. The Big 12, though, was clear that it was not The Big Eight Plus Four or The South-ish West Conference and cut the ties to the past.
The Big 12 is new, it's jerry-rigged, and now it's probably bye-bye. Sports talk radio Wednesday (I was on the road and had few other choices -- if you think radio in any mid-sized city is a wasteland, try radio on the interstate) was full of opinions about the opinions other people had expressed. At least two of the hosts -- I think it was two, but they're interchangeable so I can't be sure -- were certain that "(OU Head Football Coach) Bob Stoops would join the Pac 12 (or 10, or 16, or whatever it is right now) today if he could get out of the schedule."
Headlines speculate on which school might be asked to replace A&M, while others try to evaluate the position of a particular school in the new environment. We're told that T. Boone Pickens, a multimillionaire who has no official position at any university or conference other than that of Writer of Massive Checks to OSU Athletics, would like to see Texas Christian University brought in. The writer doesn't tell us why that matters more than the choice preferred by Norman walkabouter Three-Hat Harry, because while we all know that the size of Pickens' bank account is only reason anyone in this mess cares about Pickens' position, it's kind of gauche to say that in public. We can put the opinion in print, but we can't tell you why we're putting it in print. Standards, doncha know.
Meanwhile, at the various dogs all these tails are wagging, tuition rises faster than inflation, classes the size of some small towns are taught by adjuncts for whom English may be a third language or by some bored prof committing death by PowerPoint on a battlefield scale, young adults learn that they can act like animals as long as they commit no sins against diversity, graduates hock diploma frames to pay back student loans and seniors learn that employers don't much care about uncovering the patriarchy-silenced voices of 13th century Lithuanian quilt makers, because your resumé lists your "previous experence."
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