KANSAS CITY, Mo. — You'd suggest a statue be built of the man, but even that feels like a tacky understatement. Before Chuck Neinas, the Big 12 was tied to a log and heading for the falls.
There were catfights every five minutes. It had devolved into a comedy of defections, a chorus of malcontents, rancor and finger-pointing, madder than a box of frogs. Athletic directors and presidents at institutions of higher learning turned into soap-opera divas; clowns to the left, jokers to the right. The old girl had scraped the iceberg, and grown men couldn't hit the lifeboats quickly enough.
Before Chuck Neinas, the Big 12 was sinking. Today, it floats.
"It was very fortuitous," Oklahoma State president Burns Hargis said Thursday, during Day 2 of the Big 12's spring meetings at the InterContinental Hotel, "(that) he showed up when he showed up, at the very rocky times."
"I was called John the Baptist," quipped Neinas, the Big 12's acting commissioner since September. "But John the Baptist lost his head."
Neinas, to his credit, never did. He tamed Texas. He bandaged wounded egos. He mended fences.
While rivals griped and squabbled as to who would get to ride shotgun, Neinas somehow managed to keep the car on the road. He got adults to act like, well, adults.
"He's now another one on the list of individuals," Kansas athletic director Sheahon Zenger said, "(that) I would like to be when I grow up."
This week's meetings have been something of a media farewell tour for Neinas, who's slated to hand the reins to successor Bob Bowlsby on June 15, or — given Bowlsby's Olympic obligations — by the end of August, at the latest. The new guy rolled into town Wednesday night, and the two held court jointly during meetings all day Thursday.
"Bringing in Chuck was brilliant," noted NCAA president Mark Emmert, who made a cameo appearance to address the conference's brain trust. "He's exactly the right kind of guy to have at that moment. They made a great hire in Bob Bowlsby; that said a lot about their commitment to the future."
Last fall, the Big 12's future looked dubious, at best. Nebraska and Colorado had fled for what were considered greener, more stable, pastures. Missouri and Texas A&M accepted overtures to join the expanded Southeastern Conference. Baylor talked about suing the Aggies. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State talked about joining the Pac-12.
It was all over but the shouting. As Dan Beebe fiddled, Rome threatened to burn to a cinder.
And then, gradually, the smoke cleared. Beebe was forced out. Neinas, who'd manned the old Big Eight commissioner's chair from 1971-80 and was now an A-list athletics consultant in Colorado, got the call from the bullpen to try to put out the fire.
"I felt like Mariano Rivera," Neinas recalled. "I think I mentioned before, I had good relations with a number of people within the conference in another capacity, either as commissioner of the Big Eight or as a consultant. . . . It was not going into uncharted waters, because I knew how good these people were."
The trick was getting all of them on the same page. The Big 12 always had felt like an odd marriage, a patchwork job that, in hindsight, seemed destined for internal strife. Television revenues were closer to the model of Major League Baseball than the one enjoyed by the teams in the NFL; as a result, the rich schools got richer and the poor schools stayed poor. The Nebraska-Oklahoma game, once the Super Bowl of the Great Plains, pretty much died on the vine.
Fans in the North division griped about the league becoming nothing more than a buffed-up extension of the Southwest Conference, even though most of the members had come over from the Big Eight. The Cornhuskers grew sick of Texas, a position the Aggies had fostered for eons.
Neinas was the perfect man in the perfect place, a savior in the nick of time. Emboldened by wisdom and decades of relationships — he'd once mentored Longhorns athletic director DeLoss Dodds — the 80-year-old Neinas was able to rebuild something simple that the Big 12 had lost: a consensus. A single, unified mission.
The league dusted itself off. It replaced Mizzou and A&M with BCS up-and-comers West Virginia and Texas Christian. More important, Neinas got the kids to stop arguing and agree to grant their television rights to the conference for six years, a major coup for membership stability.
In the past six weeks, the league lured Bowlsby away from a plum job at Stanford and shook hands on a five-year bowl contract with the SEC, a collective that swings the biggest stick in major-college football. A year ago, the Big 12 was the club all the cool administrators avoided like the plague. These days, there's a line out the door.
"He was really a godsend," Hargis said.
He was a gift. They handed him a mess; Neinas handed them a future. Once the ink is dry on television deals with FOX and ESPN, each Big 12 school reportedly will take home roughly $20 million annually. A statue almost doesn't do it justice.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com
