cklablog

KU Community Exhales as Big 12 Holds Together

So what do we call ourselves?  The Big 10 is taken, and the Big 14 is still a couple of backroom deals away.

Texas and the Texettes? The Texas Ten?

Howsabout we keep it simple and refer to it as the Texas Invitational Conference (the TIC)?

It’s true that we all seem to be on that longhorn teat, but I’m not inclined to be bitter, as there’s so much obvious relief throughout the KU and K-state coaching staff and leadership.  They are all pretty clear, this is a good thing for all of us, at least through 2020.

And of course, I am enjoying the schadenfreude of watching Missouri beg the Big 10 to come and get them only to be rejected and have to run back hat-in-hand to the protective shade of the Big 12 where they will continue to get beaten like ugly step children.  In fact, they’ll get it worse now that there’s no B12 North in football — they won’t be competing for any more “division championships.”  The D-North championship is called third place, now.  So suck on that, Slavers.

And now that we can do home and away schedules in basketball, as well as play all 9 teams every year in football, the meaning of the conference championship just got a little bit bigger, which I love.  The NCAA tourney and bowls are obviously the glamorous events, and the big money, etc., but I like the idea that the conference championship matters — it makes each individual game more important than just seedings or invites.

Football has had that right for a long time, because in order to be #1 you basically have to go undefeated.  If you are challenging at that level, the individual games are huge.  Basketball, not so much.  1 through 3 (maybe 4) your seed is mostly just for bragging rights, and since the NCAA tourney is the big prize in every fan’s dreams, those other 30+ games you have to play a year to get there just don’t seem as important as they should.

Basketball season just got a lot tougher, and a lot more fun without the two worst teams in the league.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 11:08 am and is filed under Basketball, Missouri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can protect yourself from deep space radio waves altering your brain chemistry by wearing a lead hat. Tin foil is useless, according to MIT. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.