Some things -- Joanie and Chachi, Captain and Tennille, Carl Lewis and a karaoke machine -- are better kept apart, for the sake of humanity. But the Big 12, funnily enough, isn't one of them.
No, the Big 12 needs unity. It needs a collective front. One face. One voice. One heartbeat. One agenda.
So when new conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby stresses that the league is stronger with 10 members than it is with 12 -- as he did Thursday during a campus visit to the University of Kansas; his school-by-school goodwill tour is slated to hit Kansas State on Friday -- it's a fair point. A fair point on several fronts, actually.
The main one is financial, of course: The pie from a new 13-year television deal split 10 ways is a lot more appealing to athletic directors than one divided by 12. Fewer pieces to share means bigger slices across the board.
Secondly, as the SEC and ACC are finding out the hard way, if you thought a 12-team league led to scheduling headaches, good luck trying to get 14 off the runway in one piece. Should the SEC continue with its current eight-game conference slate, historic rivalries such as Georgia-Auburn -- a tilt that dates back to 1892 -- could wind up being phased from the ledger. Musical-chair realignment has already made casualties of traditional, marquee events such as Texas-Texas A&M, Pitt-West Virginia and, closer to home, Kansas-Missouri.
"I don't usually think much of hope as a strategy," Bowlsby told reporters in Lawrence, Kan. "But in this case I would hope it has calmed down. Intercollegiate athletics as a whole would be well-served by a period of calm. I think some very bad decisions have been made in conjunction with some of the conference moves, and I think history will bear that out."
Third -- and this doesn't get talked about nearly as much as the first two -- the Big 12 is still a dog with abandonment issues. It has to learn to trust again. One face. One voice. One heartbeat. One agenda.
'Texas and The Little 9' does not a happy marriage make. They tried divisions. Remember? Divisions led to a case of North vs. South, provincial cliques, a political line drawn between "us" and "them." "Us" and "them" is what helped drive a wedge between Nebraska and the Longhorns over the years, the root of what pushed the Big 12 to the edge of the cliff in the first place. The North powers grumbled about a historically Kansas City-centered body becoming too Dallas-centric; the old money in the South wondered what the heck all the fuss was about.
"I don't know that people intended it to be divisive," Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione had recalled a few months back, shortly after Bowlsby was brought in to take the reins. "It just served as a way to sort of characterize your positions on certain issues. It seemed sometimes that those philosophies sort of aggregated along the divisional lines, if you will.
"So when you go through bringing 12 new people together -- some of which had been together for a while, others are being together for the first time -- there's growing pains. So, at times, it did lend itself (toward being) divisive. And (I'm) not blaming anybody, but when people would talk about something... the teams in the North and the teams in the South, it's cyclical the way certain teams were strong and one of the divisions seems to have stronger teams than the other.
"And those kinds of things just fed on each other. I don't know why, because it was just a bracket, you know? Just a bracket that happened to be a group because of geographical proximity to each school and what was then felt (to be) natural rivals. And to make that work, some people had to give up certain things that they may have enjoyed for a lot of years."
Just a bracket? When Texas is involved, there's no such thing as "just a bracket." It's like saying The Rolling Stones are "just a band."
The buzz seems to indicate that, given the current climate, when it comes to the Big 12 and expansion, it's probably Notre Dame -- again, avoiding a return to divisional play -- or nothing at all. Although Bowlsby admits that he still gets a few feelers.
"It's kind of like junior-high dating," the new commissioner quipped. "'Would you like him if he liked you?' Sort of that back-channel stuff."
But there's no rush, no timetable and -- for once -- no worries. The Big 12 is expected to put the finishing touches on a television contract that could be worth up to $2.6 billion once the ink finally dries. One face. One voice. One heartbeat. One agenda. Love may not keep the Big 12 together, but a healthy chunk of change can pave a lot of potholes.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com
