Texas Gold: Living Large Like a Longhorn

SATIRE—Gene Stallings, once a young Junction boy of Bear Bryant, but currently the old boy of the Texas A&M Aggie's Board of Regents, must muse melancholy over the changed college football landscape and maybe even softly sing about what a long, strange trip it's been.

Bryant was a mercenary coaching man, moving for more money from Kentucky to Texas A&M, to his final sweet home in Alabama, but the changes, cable money, and league contracts made on the game might have been unimaginable to the old coach.

Dance with the devil and the fiend calls the fiddle tunes, and Texas is calling the tunes the remnants of the Big 12 dance, too.

Tom Osborne and his Nebraska Huskers never cared for the Texas two-step, so they shuffled off to the Big 10.

And the Colorado Buffaloes, like the three men Don McLean admired most, caught the last train for the coast. 

Missouri, teased and then brutally spurned by the Big 10, Iowa State, Baylor, Kansas, and Kansas State suddenly seemed like seed for the Missouri West or Conference USA.

Other conferences cared about legendary Kansas basketball about as much as Quantrill's Raiders did.

But Texas, after teasing the Pac 10, Big 10, and the SEC, made them an offer they couldn't refuse, even if it let them feeling used.

Texas gets the guaranteed gold, 25 million, and its own television network.

Texas and its pilot fish—Texas A&M and Texas Tech, along with the Oklahomas—get to split it, leaving the Big 12 many million dollar pies that Nebraska and Colorado have to pay.

Ranald "Bad Hand" Mackenzie—after he scattered them and slaughtered their horse herd—gave the Comanche better terms than the Big 12 little brothers got.

The Golden Rule is: those with the gold make the rules.

Texas will rule the Big 12, or whatever moniker emerges from the muck, like the Soviets did the Warsaw Pact.

If Mack Brown gets a bad call, or is denied an extra few seconds to beat Nebraska, maybe he will bang his shoe like Khrushchev.

The Big 12 will thrive as long the little schools survive on Texas' scraps.

The living is large when you're a Longhorn.

And I guess anything's better than playing football in the the forlorn Left Behind League of the Missouri League Western Division or something of that sort.