A decade ago, Iowa State gift-wrapped a bowl game for Alabama when a field goal attempt went directly over the upright with 45 seconds remaining. The Independence Bowl trophy is probably gathering dust behind Alabama’s national championship hardware.
This year, another Iowa State game yielded an ultimate result of sending Alabama to the BCS championship game in a regular-season divisional rematch with LSU. (Ironically, or naturally, it was because of another missed field goal directly over the upright, this time on Oklahoma State’s part.)
Iowa State’s reward for breaking the system? The Big 12’s booby prize of the 2010s, a trip to cold and expensive New York City for a game in Yankee Stadium — to be precise, New Yankee Stadium, without even the football mythos of the Army-Notre Dame or early NFL games.
There are, of course, many other things to be said about this year’s BCS matchups and the positioning of the Big 12 as a whole, nearly all of them bad. But there’s no need to go into those here. None of this, though, helps the conspiracy theory that some entities may have a vested interest in seeing the Big 12 disappear.