September 3, 2011 was game day in Columbia, Missouri. On Faurot Field, Gary Pinkel’s Tigers opened the 2011 football season with a 17-5 win over Miami of Ohio. There was little to separate it from many other season openers. It was, in almost every sense, unremarkable.
That was the 11th consecutive season Pinkel had led a team preparing for Big 12 conference play. Unknown to anyone that day, it would also be the last. The real action on that day—a fact known to only four people at the time—was happening six stories above, on the roof of the Memorial Stadium press box.
Director of Athletics Mike Alden, Chancellor Brady Deaton, Interim System President Steve Owens and Interim General Counsel Phil Hoskins convened on the roof directly above the media assembled to cover the season opener. While questions from those reporters—and countless others across the country—raged about conference realignment, Missouri’s leadership team was just a stairwell away, beginning to hammer out a resolution that would shape the future of Mizzou sports, and the University as a whole.
“The four of us met on the roof in the first quarter,” Alden said a few weeks ago. “It was almost like, ‘Enough. That’s enough.’”
“That was a meeting just to call the shots,” Deaton recalled, five years later in an office at Ellis Library on the Mizzou campus.
Missouri had been a member of the Big 12 for the past 15 years, a conference that was founded when the existing members of the Big Eight absorbed Texas, Texas A&M and, after some Lone Star-sized political posturing, Baylor and Texas Tech.
“The Big 12 was a shotgun wedding and a dysfunctional mess from day one,” R. Bowen Loftin wrote in his book, The 100-Year Decision: Texas A&M and the SEC.
Added Alden: “The structure of the Big 12, the way it was originated, in my opinion, that league was set up to fail. I do believe that if it would have been set up differently, it could have been one of the greatest leagues ever. When you set it up and you had favoritism toward one institution and then everybody else, it’s not going to work.”
Loftin was the President of Texas A&M when the Aggies made the move from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference. The decision for Missouri to make that same leap was, for all intents and purposes, made that September morning as the University of Missouri’s four major power brokers reached their breaking point.
“The question was then, could we effectively make a go of it with the Big 12?” Deaton said. “We said, ‘No, we cannot.’”
Just 64 days after that meeting, Missouri was admitted as the 14th member of the SEC, bringing an end to a process that lasted nearly 700 days and involved four of the country’s five major conferences.
This fall, five years after Missouri joined its seventh athletic conference, major players involved in making—and covering—the decision spoke to PowerMizzou.com about the process, often revealing insight that has not previously been shared.
On Thursday morning, we will take a comprehensive look back at the process that led Missouri from its long-time home in the Big 12 to a spot in the Southeastern Conference. It was a process that lasted nearly two calendar years. Those involved took us through every key step, giving us a look at what really happened during the most chaotic 22 months in the history of college sports.
Check back tomorrow for the complete oral history of Missouri's conference move, as told by those who made it happen.
