(10-23-2019 03:52 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  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.

It's both power politics and a difference in culture.

The core of the former Big 12 North ran the Big 8. When the Big 8 went away, they lost their conference. They went from running a conference to being subservient to Texas. They lost a lot of 7-5 votes when the Big 12 was formed, most notably the location of the headquarters: Dallas over Kansas City. In the meantime, the Oklahoma schools didn't mind being in a conference with the axis of power in Texas.

The differences between Big 12 North and South are more subtle than not. Kansas is much more like Texas than California. Kansas City is known for barbecue, as is Texas. There is a lot of wide open space with farming and ranching throughout the conference. The difference is that the northern states are not economically and culturally tied to the state of Texas, and would just as soon do without Texas. Oklahoma, on the other hand, is economically and culturally tied to the state of Texas. The connections between the states of Oklahoma and Texas lead to animosity and feed the rivalry between OU and UT.