So the conference realignment fight has truly begun.

Of course, it hasn’t been much of a fight by the Big 12, which is taking its lumps from both left (the Pac-10) and right (the Big Ten).

What’s both sad and pathetic is that the Big 12 might have been able to do some damage, if its leaders had had the gumption to get out there and take a few punches. Instead of sitting back and allowing itself to be raided, the Big 12 could have been the raiders.

With Colorado having packed its bags for the Pac-10 and Nebraska reportedly on its way to the Big Ten, the Big 12’s demise is inevitable. And it didn’t have to be this way.

If you were the second-biggest kid in school, would you sit on your hands while your pesky little classmates poked and prodded you and stole your lunch money? Of course you wouldn’t. But that’s exactly what the Big 12 did.

One could make the argument that over the past decade, the Big 12 has distinguished itself as the second-best conference in the country behind the SEC, particularly when you look at the entire sports landscape. Sure, the league was hampered by an antiquated, poorly negotiated television contract. But on the field, the Big 12 shined.

Since 2000, a Big 12 school has played in the BCS national championship football game seven out of 10 times. The conference ranked No. 1 in RPI in both men’s and women’s basketball in 2009-10. Baseball suffered a down year this season, yet still managed to send half its teams on to the NCAA tournament, and has advanced at least one team to the College World Series in eight of the past 11 years.

What was to prevent the Big 12 schools from getting together and flexing their own muscle? The league could have approached TCU, Utah, BYU and Boise State about joining and creating a Super 16. Or trade Boise for Arkansas.

Or what about this — the Big 12 beckons Arizona, Arizona State, USC and UCLA instead. Are those schools so loyal to Stanford, Cal and the Pacific Northwest schools that they wouldn’t have at least listened to such a proposal? Instead, the Big 12 allowed the Pac-10, an inferior athletic conference with a comparable TV contract, to be the aggressor and start picking off its schools.

Talk about a failure of leadership. As the Big 12 crumbles around him, commissioner Dan Beebe comes off looking like a powerless buffoon. Last week’s league meetings in Kansas City provided Beebe the perfect opportunity to rally the troops and formulate a plan. Instead, the troops sensed defeat and started defecting the first chance they got.

With a chance to man up like General MacArthur, Beebe gave the league Colonel Sanders.

Oh, but guess what? Beebe did issue a statement following Colorado’s defection Thursday. In part, it read, “I continue to work through the process that was agreed upon last week by our Board of Directors to address membership issues, and are working tirelessly towards the long-term viability of the Big 12.”

Apparently, the commish is working so tirelessly that he couldn’t bother to assign someone to proofread his grammar.

The long-term viability of the Big 12 is this: There is none. It’s rather telling, is it not, that every breaking news report, that every new development, seems to involve speculation about where the remaining Big 12 schools are headed.

In the immortal words of Colorado coach Dan Hawkins, “This ain’t the Big 12! This is intramurals, brutha!” Whoops . . . that was the other way around, wasn’t it?

If anything, with Nebraska bolting, the Big Ten is now the Big 12 and the Big 12 is now the Small Ten — and getting smaller by the moment.

So, rest in peace, Big 12. We hardly new ye.

When we do the autopsy, we’ll discover that your cause of death was a lack of fight.

bcherry@wacotrib.com

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