There were teams who got screwed to midmajor status during the SWC breakup, right? Do they not count?
The University of Houston is the only school that has a case of claiming they were "screwed" when the SWC broke up. Rice, SMU, TCU, and Baylor had little to no business being in the conference with the likes of Texas, A&M, Tech, and Arkansas at the time of that conference dissolving.
is the difference between Rice/SMU/TCU/Baylor 95 vs. Texas/A&M/Tech '95 and K-State '17 vs. OU/Texas '17 not comparable?
put another way, are we a modern day version of those SWC have nots? I really don't know and maybe it doesn't matter, but this "unprecedented" talk seems a little odd given the SWC shakeup
Tell me one legit comparable between those small private schools in Texas and K-State and those tiny Texas colleges and I'll cede the point. If you think about what you're asking, you've answered the question already. If K-State were ever to be left behind it was in 1994-95. The Big 8 didn't stay together and decide to keep those larger schools, both conferences died, Texas knew full well we (The Big 8) needed them. K-State was insignificant at the time, to say the least. We should have been left then, we were not. The health of this program is leaps and bounds beyond what we were then. In 1994 we were probably far and away the weakest public program in major college football, now we're virtually indistinguishable from other schools like Mississippi State, Washington State, Arizona State, Colorado, Texas Tech, etc.
One more gigantic difference between this situation and 1995 is how wide the gulf is between the bottom of the power five; Boston College, Wake, Miami, Baylor, is how large the gulf has grown between them and the group of five. The old WAC and the MAC weren't far behind the other conferences at all. The BCS and the big numbers of schools that have jumped to the FBS have made that gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon.
