Linehan: Women's basketball the real victim if Big 12 Conference breaks up

Bill Fennelly sat inside his empty arena for a few minutes Friday night and pondered the past.

He's got a lot to think about these days.

While half the country's sports media and a good chunk of its amateur bloggers expound on how conference realignment will change the college football landscape, there are 12 teams getting shafted by this whole mess and it's going severely underreported. Because while the Pac-10, SEC, Big Ten and even Mountain West offer excellent opportunities on the gridiron, the Big 12 has spent the last decade and a half building a reputation as the place to play women's basketball.

By the end of this week it could all be a memory.

Fennelly, the women's basketball coach at Iowa State, vented his frustration 140 characters at a time last week via his Twitter account (@ISUCoachFen).

"College is suppose 2 mean HIGHER education-so can someone explain how u break up the BEST college conference in the nationIF U are smart?" he posted on Thursday.

Women's basketball has perhaps the least parity of any college sport. Ohio State finished the 2009-10 season with eight more wins than the second best team in the Big Ten, while in the Pac-10 Stanford finished 11 wins ahead of second-place UCLA. In the SEC Kentucky gave the legendary Lady Vols some competition, finishing five games back overall, four in conference. And in the Big East? UConn's 39-0 record left every other team without even a reason to try.

Not so in the Big 12. Even as Nebraska ended the regular season undefeated, it only had five more wins than Oklahoma or Baylor, who shared the Big 12's second-highest total of overall wins last season.

"The disconcerting part of this is our conference has built such a special brand. I honestly believe it's college athletics in its purest form," OU coach Sherri Coale told the Tulsa World on Thursday. "Now it could be wadded up, torn to shreds and tossed across the continental United States."

Last March only the Big 12 and SEC saw four teams survive until the Sweet Sixteen. Both Baylor and Oklahoma played in the Final Four, and neither team was the regular season or conference tournament champion.

That's the Big 12's reputation. There are conferences where most elite athletes would never play because they know only one program has any chance at serious success.

Not in the Big 12. Seven teams have won the Big 12's 13 championships. Six teams have winning conference records.

The Big 12 has only three NCAA championships, but it's the only conference where more than two teams have won. Four conference teams have made the Final Four.

That postseason success happens because Big 12 teams beat up on each other all year long. In 2009 Texas Tech opened conference play with a 65-62 win against eighth-ranked Texas. In February the Lady Raiders ended a six-game losing streak by beating No. 13 Texas A&M 57-54.

Tech coach Kristy Curry, like many coaches around the country, chose not to comment last week as rumors watered down fact. But I wouldn't be surprised if she shares Fennelly's and Coale's concerns.

It's rational to worry about what breaking up the Big 12 could do to their sport. This is one place where actual progress is occurring, where the playing field is leveling off.

Big 12 women's basketball is competitive, and that parity helps its marketability. It's the reason the Big 12 has led the country in attendance for 11 of its 13 seasons and why it set an NCAA attendance record last year.

Coale's right; the conference is being stripped apart and scattered across the country. There are probably few ways she or anyone else can stop the events that seem inevitable these next few weeks. Football teams continue to bring in the cash to fund many women's basketball programs, so administrations will keep trying to profit from those football teams and their TV contracts.

For a decade and a half the Big 12 has been working to change that. Now that progress may be wadded up and thrown away with the conference.

COURTNEY LINEHAN IS THE AVALANCHE-JOURNAL SPORTS EDITOR. SHE CAN BE REACHED AT COURTNEY.LINEHAN@LUBBOCKONLINE.COM.