IOWA STATE/KANSAS: I hope you’re happy! I hope you’re happy now! I hope you’re happy how you hurt your cause forever! I hope you think you’re clever!
MISSOURI/TEXAS A&M: I hope you’re happy! I hope you’re happy too! I hope you’re proud how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition!
ALL: So though I can’t imagine how, I hope you’re happy right now…
—The beginning of “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked”*
Thirty-six hours after this post is published, Missouri and Texas A&M will no longer be members of the Big 12 Conference. The University of Missouri will sever its ties to three universities it has been together with for more than half the time Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri have been states. Texas A&M, the biggest Little Brother around, is going to move out of the family home.
I don’t wish them luck in the SEC. I want them to struggle and beg for a bowl game in Shreveport. I want the remainder of the old Big Eight to blackball Missouri and the old Southwest Conference to do the same to A&M. I want the loss of the Border War to stand for the historical consequences of conference realignment. When a roommate stabs you in the back, leaves you for dead, and then says, “But we can still be friends, right?” you don’t have a reconciliation in the next year or the next decade.
The Big 12, fortunately, is moving on. TCU and West Virginia will be coming in. The conference will live. It will be different, again. Parts of the history that makes college sports what it is will be just that, history.