Ames Times, January 23, 1908:
Will play in the Big Nine
Will join Missouri Valley Conference. Student body delighted. Bigger games with bigger teams next season.
Ames accepts the invitation to join the Missouri Valley Athletic Association. Such is the decision recently made by manager S.W. Beyer of the athletic council of the Iowa State College. Immediately after New Year’s, the Missouri Valley association held a meeting and decided to take in several more big colleges in order to add strength to their schedule. Ames and Drake received invitations to join, Ames has accepted and will play in the big nine of the west this year. …
In the future Ames will play such schools at St. Louis, Lincoln, Kansas City, and Denver and the Universities of Kansas and Oklahoma if those schools are admitted. It begins to look as it Ames was moving to the top in athletic lines.
Ames Daily Tribune and Times, December 2, 1927:
Missouri Valley Conference will be broken up today
Six schools in farewell bow to old mates / Expect new lineup will be announced by little four
… Six schools — Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Iowa State — have withdrawn from the old loop, leaving Washington U., Drake, Grinnell and Oklahoma Aggies technically in possession of a decimated conference.
Question has arisen, however, as to which group of schools should be permitted use of the name Missouri Valley. The larger group representatives are expected to urge the four remaining schools to abrogate their technical claim. (They would not. — Ed.)
Backtracking a bit and moving 120 miles east-southeast, there was a one-paragraph story in the middle of Page 11 of the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, May 26, 1911:
S.U.I. to join “Big 8” league
The University of Iowa has decided to withdraw from the Missouri Valley conference of athletics according to an announcement made here today. The commission in charge of athletics decided upon this course at a meeting last night and the formal withdrawal scheduled to occur at Des Moines today. The Iowa University athletes plan to affiliate with the “Big 8” colleges.
The State University of Iowa considers its affiliation with the Western Conference to have started in 1899. It was apparently double-dipping somehow, as it played multiple MVIAA teams in football, and/but “variance in rules between the western conference and the Missouri Valley conference was sufficient to cause constant embarrassment and eventually compel the withdrawal of the university from the latter conference” (Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, December 28, 1912).
The Western Conference had a “Big 8” nickname for some period in the early 1900s — Michigan’s exile cut the membership for a while, then Ohio State came in to make it the “Big Nine,” then Michigan came back. The first appearance of the phrase “Big Ten Conference” in a Cedar Rapids newspaper is November 21, 1917, but it remained more often referred to as the Western.
So the State University of Iowa was in a Big Eight, but not that Big Eight, and both Ames College and SUI were in a Big Nine, but different Big Nines, and the naming periods for each do not appear to have overlapped in time.
Then slightly under a century later the Big Ten would progress into a 14-team conference, the Big 12 would be reduced to a 10-team conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference would add two universities on the Ohio River, and all that would be considered acceptable.
It’s fine. It’s all fine. Everything is fine.