The Big 12’s Hate Week died, and now all we have are BU-TT and FARMAGEDDON

Look at the Big 12’s schedule for Hate Week, 2009. It’s neat, tidy, and spiteful.

Now, look at 2018’s:

Sure, it’s got big stakes in Oklahoma-West Virginia and some bowl eligibility on the line, but there’s only a faint hint of hate here.

What we do have are some games with silly names and hilarious recent history. Baylor and Texas Tech meet in the BuTT Bowl. Kansas State and Iowa State play in FARMAGEDDON. And this is where I remind you that Kansas beat Texas in 2016. That’s it.

Let’s start with Nebraska and Colorado. It was barely a rivalry, given the fact that the Huskers historically dominated the Buffs. But the mid-1980s came around and CU got good. Cue the hatred, thanks to former coach Dan McCartney.

Colorado and Nebraska each left the Big 12 in 2011, and their annual matchup went out the window. Perhaps you remember when this all got announced in 2010 and we got near this nuclear option?

A Big 12 football coach, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told ESPN.com’s Mark Schlabach on Wednesday night if Nebraska left the Big 12 the conference would dissolve, according to his athletic director and university president. The coach said Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado would join the Pac-10, leaving Baylor, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri and Iowa State behind.

The Huskers did indeed go to the Big Ten. AD Tom Osborne said at the time that “this is not a financial windfall,” but by 2018 the Big Ten’s revenue sharing agreement would give out $14 million more to its members than the Big 12’s would. Colorado left for greener pastures as well in the Pac-12, and the teams didn’t get back together until 2018. There’s another game scheduled for 2019 and two more in 2023 and 2024, but the series isn’t regular and both teams aren’t in the Big 12 anyway.

Neither are Texas A&M nor Missouri. Their rivalries with Texas and Kansas were effectively killed off — on the field, at least — when they left for the SEC.

The reason the Texas schools don’t play again is hubris. A&M wants you to think its big, bad in-conference schedule is just too hard. But Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, and South Carolina all somehow find a way to play an out of conference game on Thanksgiving weekend after their brutal SEC gauntlets.

Texas certainly isn’t blameless here either, primarily because its posturing to leave the Big 12 helped kickstart the whole realignment wave to begin with. But at least the Horns have publicly expressed interest to play the Aggies. It’s a shrewd move to put the ball publicly in A&M’s court, whether UT really wants to renew the game or not.

As for Missouri and Kansas, they can’t even get on the same page about a basketball game, much less the football series.

So for now, the Big 12 sits in Hate Week limbo because the almighty dollar pulled a third of its old membership elsewhere.

There’s one very easy step: put Bedlam back on Thanksgiving weekend permanently.

The game was moved earlier in the month because the Big 12 brought its championship game back. The league wanted to decrease its chances of getting a rematch two weekends in a row. Lo and behold, the game is returning to Thanksgiving in 2019, and the world does not look like it’s going to implode.

The league’s schedule rotation in 2019 puts Texas-Texas Tech on Black Friday. It’s not a perfect substitute for Texas-Texas A&M on Thanksgiving, but it’s at least something with in-state stakes and a trophy.

Kansas and Kansas State don’t have the amount of hatred that Kansas and Mizzou have for each other, but it also would be fun to add that game to the Thanksgiving weekend schedule, seeing as how they played two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2018.

Removing any mandate to play conference games on Thanksgiving weekend would be another step in a hateful direction. That would let West Virginia play Pitt instead of a Big 12 team on Thanksgiving weekend, if the two schools were up for it. The series is already coming back for at least four years in 2022.

And in both of those, the silly rivalry nicknames are better than the actual on-field spite.

There’s no easy fix, and we’ll never get back to that perfectly hateful 2009 slate as long as conference alignments are like they stand now. But there are some ways to bring back the hate. That’s what college football is all about, even if some current and former Big 12 members chased cash a few years ago and severed decades-old ties.