The Big 12 was formed when four schools from the disbanded Southwest Conference -- Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor and Texas Tech -- joined forces with Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State of the Big Eight. Unlike the eleven-team "Big 10" or the fourteen-team "Atlantic 10," these institutions opted to create a new identity, and an accurate member count in their name. Thus, the Big 12 was born.
One style point... the actual trademarked name of the conference is "Big 12" though the conference logo includes a roman numeral "XII".
Basketball Powers
Fresh off their National Championship The Kansas Jayhawks are the conference's top team, boasting the conference's only national title and having won or shared the regular-season championship in eight of twelve years. And with a strong recruiting class, coach Bill Self and the Jayhawks should be top contenders again in 2008-09.Texas, under coach Rick Barnes, and Kansas State, under Frank Martin, have also been top teams for the last few years, with the Longhorns producing recent NBA draft picks D.J. Austin and Kevin Durant and the Wildcats Michael Beasley.
