(10-23-2019 03:19 PM)johnintx Wrote:  I have fond memories of the Big 8, but it was Kansas, Kansas State, and Missouri's conference. Nebraska and Iowa State were along for the ride. Colorado was an outlier. OU was an outlaw, especially with its NCAA issues and, in the 80's, it's renegade coaches (Switzer and Tubbs). OSU wasn't allowed to come along with the original schools, and didn't make it into the conference until 1957. Conference headquarters were in Kansas City. There was always a basketball tournament in Kansas City. Before post-season tournaments caught wind across the country, the Big 8 for decades conducted a holiday tournament in Kansas City. The Big 8 worked well for the five schools closest to KC. The Oklahoma schools often felt outnumbered in the power structure of the Big 8. In addition, Oklahomans, for better or worse, are more oriented to Texas than to the Midwest. Texans are much different from midwesterners.

See, I've been looking for a post like this, because while I have long understood the oil and water split between the Big 8 schools and the Texas schools, I have never understood *why* there was such a split.

That is, to me, never having lived in those parts of the country, states like Texas and Oklahoma and Nebraska and Colorado and Missouri and Kansas should be very culturally compatible. They are all in my mind "western" states of the mid-continent. I think of cowboys and Home on the Range and the Great Plains and cattle drives, Fort Worth and Dodge City when i think of all of them. It's not like the ACC, with ridiculously different places like Boston, Miami, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, and Louisville.

So I always assumed the split, and what drove Nebraska and Mizzou and Colorado away was the same thing that drove TAMU away - pure raw power politics, namely the dislike of living in the Texas/Oklahoma shadow.

But until now I've never really felt a *cultural* difference between the non-Oklahoma Big 8 states and the Oklahoma/Texas nexus.

But now I think I do.