About a year ago I decided to write a book about the Big 12’s rich history of excellent offensive play. The book was going to be titled, “The 10 greatest QBs in Big 12 history.”
That seemed reasonable enough a project given that the Big 12 has only existed since 1996 and I’ve watched it carefully for the majority of that period and written on it throughout this decade. I ran into a few problems though, the obvious problem came in trying to find a good way to differentiate between all of the different players. Not only was it hard to develop a strong criteria for choosing the top 10 but perhaps even more difficult was making choices such as 2017 Baker Mayfield vs 2011 RG3 or 2005 Vince Young.
Another problem I ran into was that I kept accidentally writing another book. After producing a few chapters and thousands of words simply setting up the rest of the book I realized that what I really wanted to do was write a history of how the spread offense conquered the Big 12. So just after the conclusion of the 2018 season I switched gears and produced this work:
The book tracks the formation of the Big 12 conference as a marriage between the powerful but demographically limited Big 8 and four Texas teams from the Southwest conference. Once those innovative and passionate programs were connected to Texas and the quickly evolving Texas HS football system, it became inevitable that the HUNH spread would come to dominate the conference. Key chapters include the introduction of “the Pirate” Mike Leach by Bob Stoops, a description of dominant HS ball at Southlake Carroll in the early 2000s, the 2008 Big 12 season, and then Art Briles and the new decade.
I hope y’all will read and enjoy the book, if you do please review it on Amazon and tell your friends and family. In future weeks I’m hoping to have it up on iBooks and possibly in a hard copy format.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments, I have a good idea of some inevitable questions that will come.
Let me know if you get it out in hardcopy.
Ima need something to throw at the TV this fall.
It will be in hard copy, I’ll announce whenever it’s ready. I already submitted it, just waiting on Amazon to finalize.