The History of the Southwest Conference: College Sports' Saloon

This summer has been the summer of realignment in college sports. With Houston, BYU, UCF, and Cincinnati joining the Big 12, followed by Oregon and Washington announcing they would join USC and UCLA in the Big 10 and Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah jumping ship to the Big 12, nobody was quite surprised to see Cal, Stanford, and SMU jump to the ACC. We're all just so used to it by now.

But this isn't the first time massive change has happened in college sports, even in the state of Texas. With Rice moving to the American and SMU announcing their jump to the ACC, every member of the former Southwest Conference---Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Baylor, TCU, Houston, Rice, SMU, Arkansas, and even schools like Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Southwestern, and Phillips University---has moved conferences at least once since its creation in 1915. While it stood for just over 80 years, its legacy isn't that of great athletics or all-century teams, but that of under-the-table deals and men in suits too busy either paying players or bragging about their successes to move forward as a group. And it cost them their conference. Turns out everything is bigger in Texas---except television payouts in 1990.

Join me as I provide a quick run-through of the Southwest's history and the history of its major players, all crammed into under 20 minutes. As always, if there's more to the story than what I'd said in the video, or if I worded something wrong (or if I was just flat out wrong) be sure to point it out in the comments below.

All video and audio is utilized under Fair Use, under the pretext of education.

Source Credits:
WholeHogSports
TSHAonline
ESPN
Sports Illustrated
Some screencaps taken from Sports Illustrated and Wikipedia