Big 12 Championship a Throwback

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Forgive football fans in Oklahoma and Nebraska if they’re a little misty-eyed this week. It’s the time of year where nostalgia is being packaged, pushed and peddled across the country.

Rudolph and Charlie Brown are on the television sets again, more people will hear a Bing Crosby song in the next week than the rest of the year combined, and the Cornhuskers and Sooners are playing for the conference championship.

Same as it ever was.

Except it hasn’t happened before. At least not in the Big 12.

Somewhat silently, with the downfall of Miami and Florida State and the rise of the Big East garnering much of the spotlight, the Big XII has put together one of its worst seasons in the league’s decade-long history. The 2006 trail of tears:

-- The league won exactly zero games against ranked nonconference opponents in nine attempts this year. September’s Separation Saturday may not have cleared up the national title picture as much as we had hoped, but it went a long way towards cementing the Big 12’s place in the conference pecking order.

On that third Saturday of the season Iowa State fell to Iowa, Texas Tech was nearly shut out by TCU, Colorado succumbed to Arizona State, Nebraska folded against USC and Oklahoma “lost” to Oregon. Weeks like that early in the season had the conference looking like the littlest “Big” in the BCS.

-- Since the league’s inception in 1996, it has had three Heisman trophy winners and five runners-up. This year no conference representative will be in New York. The league’s Heisman hopes went down with Adrian Peterson on October 14.

-- In nine of the Big 12’s previous ten seasons, at least one team has headed into the conference championship game ranked in the AP top three. This year Oklahoma (AP #8) is the league’s only representative in the top 15.

For a conference used to contending for national titles, the 2006 campaign seems like one to be stricken from the record books. (Along with that Oklahoma-Oregon debacle.)

Which is why the first meeting between Oklahoma and Nebraska in the Big 12 Championship game couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. With a horde of young talent learning the ropes in Manhattan, Columbia and Stillwater, the Big 12 slipped a bit from its usual perch near the top of the college football mountain.

Texas looked like the league’s only contender, but when Colt McCoy went down, so did the Longhorns. Missouri and Texas A&M made strides, but they weren’t quite ready to make the leap this year. Oklahoma and Nebraska both survived mid-season setbacks to secure their spot, and somehow it feels right.

See, this is the way we assumed it would always be when the Big 8 merged with four teams from the Southwest Conference in 1996 to create the Big 12.

In the quarter-century prior to the birth of the new super-conference, Oklahoma or Nebraska won the Big 8 championship 23 out of 25 years. In the 1980s alone, the two teams’ yearly regular season match-up decided the conference champion seven times.

For the better part of 20 years it seemed like every OU-NU game was a Great Plains playoff that was one of the last pieces in the national championship puzzle. Between 1970 and 1995, enough oranges littered the fields at each team’s Memorial Stadium to fill the actual Orange Bowl. The names were as electric as the games and plays themselves: I.M. Hipp, Elvis Peacock, Jarvis Redwine, Buster Rhymes, Wonder Monds, The Boz.

The Big 12 changed all that. The two-division format meant that Oklahoma and Nebraska would no longer meet every year and both teams filled their traditional post-Thanksgiving slots with regional rivals. New conference heavyweights like Kansas State, Texas and Texas A&M were emerging as was a more modern, spread-offense brand of football and the Big 8 titans would take their lumps.

Back in 1996, Oklahoma opened play in the Big 12 with three straight sub-.500 seasons under John Blake before Bob Stoops arrived in 1999 and resurrected the football program sooner than anyone could’ve imagined with a national title in 2000.

But as Oklahoma began their return to prominence, Nebraska started their descent. Stoops first year in the conference marked the Cornhuskers’ last appearance in the Big 12 championship game. In 2004, Bill Callahan was named head coach and charged with overhauling the option offense. By that time, Oklahoma was fully rebuilt. Nebraska was just beginning. The rivalry was officially in limbo.

Things heated up again pretty quickly, however. Callahan’s arrival meant the departure of defensive coordinator, Bo Pelini, who went straight to Oklahoma in 2004. Norman’s most wanted, John Blake, became Nebraska’s defensive line coach. In his first OU-NU game, Bill Callahan, angered by a perceived attempt at running up the score, angled for a stick-it field goal to end the game, then exited the field under the traditional hail of oranges and infamously called the Oklahoma fans “(expletive) hillbillies.”

But it isn’t hate that makes a rivalry great, it’s stakes and they are as high as they’ve ever been between the new Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Bob Stoops is looking for a win and the BCS bowl berth that would accompany it to cap off a tumultuous season and bring to a close perhaps his most masterful coaching job to date.

Meanwhile, Bill Callahan is searching for that signature win that would officially move Nebraska out of the rebuilding stage and into the reloading phase.

Even the game itself is a throwback with a modern twist. Remember “Irresistible Oklahoma Meets Immovable Nebraska?” The roles might be reversed this year with the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year, Nebraska’s Zac Taylor, going toe-to-toe with the conference’s Defensive Player of the Year, Rufus Alexander of Oklahoma.

Sure there’s no national title on the line, there won’t be any fruit-flinging from the fans on hand and the winner “only” gets the right to play college football’s ultimate nouveau-riche Boise State.

But in a year that has felt far from traditional in the Big 12, Oklahoma-Nebraska might be just the mix of new-school and nostalgia the conference needs heading into the bowl season.

Now the only question is how far can you throw a bag of corn chips?