Big Eight Conference

The conference was founded as the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MVIAA) at a meeting on January 12, 1907 of five charter member institutions: the University of Kansas, the University of Missouri, the University of Nebraska, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Iowa, which also maintained its concurrent membership in the Western Conference (now the Big Ten Conference). However, Iowa only participated in football and outdoor men's track and field for a brief period before leaving the conference in 1911.[5]

In 1908, Drake University and Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) joined the MVIAA, increasing the conferences membership to seven. Iowa, which was a joint member, departed the conference in 1911 to return to sole competition in the Western Conference, but Kansas State University joined the conference in 1913. Nebraska left in 1918 to play as an independent for two seasons before returning in 1920. In 1919, the University of Oklahoma and Saint Louis University applied for membership, but were not approved due to deficient management of their athletic programs.[6] The conference then added Grinnell College in 1919, with the University of Oklahoma applying again and being approved in 1920. Oklahoma A&M University (now Oklahoma State University) joined in 1925, bringing conference membership to ten, an all-time high.[7]

At a meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, on May 19, 1928, the conference split up. Six of the seven state schools (all except Oklahoma A&M) formed a conference that was initially known as the Big Six Conference.[2] Just before the start of fall practice, the six schools announced they would retain the MVIAA name for formal purposes. However, fans and media continued to call it the Big Six. The three private schools – Drake, Grinnell, and Washington University – joined with Oklahoma A&M to form the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC).[8] The old MVIAA's administrative staff transferred to the MVC.

The similarity of the two conferences' official names, as well as the competing claims of the two conferences, led to considerable debate over which conference was the original and which was the spin-off, though the MVIAA went on to become the more prestigious of the two. For the remainder of the Big Eight's run, both conferences claimed 1907 as their founding date, as well as the same history through 1927. To this day, it has never been definitively established which conference was the original.

Locations of final Big Eight Conference full member institutions, 1957–1995

Conference membership grew with the addition of the University of Colorado on December 1, 1947, from the Mountain States Conference.[9] Later that month, Reaves E. Peters was hired as "Commissioner of Officials and Assistant Secretary" and set up the first conference offices in Kansas City, Missouri. With the addition of Colorado, the conference's unofficial name became the Big Seven Conference, coincidentally, the former unofficial name of the MSC.

The final membership change happened ten years later, when Oklahoma A&M joined (or rejoined, depending on the source) the conference on June 1, 1957,[10] and the conference became known as the Big Eight. That same year, Peters' title was changed to "Executive Secretary" of the conference. He retired in June 1963 and was replaced by Wayne Duke, whose title was later changed to "Commissioner".

In 1964, the conference legally assumed the name "Big Eight Conference". In 1968 the conference began a long association with the Orange Bowl, sending its champion annually to play in the prestigious bowl game in Miami, Florida.

In the early 1990s, most of the colleges in Division I-A (now known as the Football Bowl Subdivision) were members of the College Football Association; this included members of the Big Eight and Southwest Conferences. Following a Supreme Court decision in 1984, the primary function of the CFA was to negotiate television broadcast rights for its member conferences and independent colleges. In February 1994, the Southeastern Conference announced that they, like the Big Ten, Pac-10, and Notre Dame before them, would be leaving the CFA and negotiate independently for a television deal that covered SEC schools only. This led The Dallas Morning News to proclaim that "the College Football Association as a television entity is dead".[11] More significantly, this change in television contracts ultimately would lead to significant realignment of college conferences, with the biggest change being the dissolution of the Big Eight and the Southwest Conferences and the formation of the Big 12.

After the SEC's abandonment of the CFA, the Southwest Conference and the Big Eight Conference saw potential financial benefits from an alliance to negotiate television deals, and quickly began negotiations to that end, with ABC and ESPN. Though there were complications over the next several weeks (some of which are detailed below), on February 25, 1994, it was announced that a new conference would be formed from the members of the Big Eight and four of the Texas member colleges of the Southwest Conference.[12][13][14] Though the name would not be made official for several months, newspaper accounts immediately dubbed the new entity the "Big 12".[15] Charter members of the Big 12 included the members of the Big Eight plus Baylor, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech.

Following the formation of the Big 12 Conference in 1994, the Big Eight continued operations till August 30, 1996, when the conference was formally dissolved and its members officially began competition in the Big 12 Conference. Although the Big 12 was essentially the Big Eight plus the four Texas schools, the Big 12 regards itself as a separate conference and does not claim the Big Eight's history as its own.

Full members Other Conference

Following are the MVIAA/Big Eight regular-season conference champions from 1908 to 1996 (showing shared championships in italics):[1][35]

Shared championships are shown in italics:[1][36]

^† Kansas would have won the 1960 title, but after found to be using an ineligible player they were forced to forfeit their victories over Missouri and Colorado, which meant that Missouri was awarded the 1960 Big Eight title.
^‡ Oklahoma initially won the 1972 title, but after it was found that they used ineligible players, they were penalized by the NCAA, though they did not force OU to forfeit games. The Big Eight asked them to forfeit three games and awarded the title to Nebraska, but Oklahoma still claims these wins and this title.

The national championships listed below are for the final eight members of the conference, as of July 2014. Football, Helms, and equestrian titles are included in the total, but excluded from the column listing NCAA and AIAW titles.

The modern era of full integration of league sports began at Kansas State, with Harold Robinson. In 1949, Harold Robinson played football for Kansas State with an athletic scholarship. In doing so, Robinson broke the modern "color barrier" in conference athletics, and also became the first ever African-American athlete on scholarship in the conference.[39][40] Harold Robinson later received a letter of congratulations from Jackie Robinson, who had reintegrated major league baseball in 1947 while playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers.[39]

In the spring of 1951 the conference's baseball color barrier was broken by Kansas State's Earl Woods, and in the winter of 1951–1952 Kansas State's Gene Wilson and Kansas's LaVannes C. Squires jointly broke the conference color barrier in basketball.

Nebraska was the third league school to (re)integrate its athletic teams, with Charles Bryant joining the football team in 1952.[41] Iowa State would be next, with Harold Potts and Henry Philmon reintegrating the Cyclone football team in 1953.[42] The following season, Franklin Clarke became the first varsity African-American football player at the University of Colorado. In 1955, Homer Floyd became the first African-American to play football for the KU Jayhawks since Ed Haney in 1893. Sports teams at the remaining three conference schools (Oklahoma, Missouri and Oklahoma State) were subsequently all integrated by the end of the 1950s. Most notably, Prentice Gautt became the first black player for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma in 1956.

Every college football team of the Big Eight was fully integrated by the end of the 1950s and this gave the conference an advantage throughout the 1960s as many opposing conferences had not yet integrated their sports teams. The Southeastern Conference who was well known as the last major college sports conference to oppose integration had particular trouble against the Big Eight during its final years fielding all White teams (the first SEC school to integrate Kentucky did so in 1967 and the last school to do so Mississippi did so in 1972.) During the SEC’s 8 year national championship drought between 1965 and 1973, the Big Eight teams repeatedly defeated the SEC teams in inter-conference games some of which were National Championships largely due to their integrated teams.[43]

The Big Eights best season ever 1971 ended with three Big Eight schools Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Colorado finishing Number 1, 2, and 3 in the final AP poll the only season in college football history that three teams from the same conference finished in the top three rankings.[44] During that season, all three of those teams beat SEC schools Alabama, Auburn, and LSU in blowout victories. In each of the Big Eight victories in that season and the other seasons during this time period, the performance of each Big Eight Schools’ Black Players many of whom were All Americans was a deciding factor in the Big Eight victories.[45] These players performance contributed to the SEC schools recruitment of Black Players as the next National Championship won by the SEC in 1973 was by an integrated Alabama team.[46]