By MARK WANGRIN
Lindy's Sports
August 13, 2008

- Used to be if you liked snot bubbles and shutouts, you loved the teams that formed the Big 12. Just plain loved them.

Touchdowns meant something. Plunges into the two-gap, old-fashioned, leg-pumping, ground-bound offense got pulses throbbing. Blood and grass stains, goal line stands, every allowed first down a blow to the heart of any self-respecting defensive coordinator.

By gosh,, that was football. Defense was king. The mantra was "If you score you might win -- if they don't score you can't lose."

Yes, a mantra ... not a punch line. Not like it is now.

Now it's more like, "If you score 40 you might win -- if they don't score 40 you can't lose."

This is the conference whose predecessors gave us the Wishbone, and Blackshirt defense, some of the greatest defensive players in college football history, and scores that Major League baseball teams now claim as fine pitching efforts.

Yup, and it's the same conference that last season was the highest scoring league in college football.

"I could never imagine," said Kansas State coach Ron Prince, "that scoring 36 points a game would be sixth in the league."

"The scoring," said Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy, "is here to stay."

Let that sink in for a moment.

Big 12 teams averaged 33.4 points a game. The best scoring defense in the league, Kansas, allowed 16.2 points a game. A defensive coordinator who comes to the Big 12 and shuts people down can write his own head coaching ticket (see Bo Pelini, Gene Chizik and Greg Robinson). If you can't, no worries. You're just average.

The plague has infected everybody. Last year against Kansas, Nebraska gave up 10 touchdowns in a 76-36 beatdown.

In all of 1996, Nebraska allowed seven touchdowns.

"When I first came back in the league and saw the numbers, I was a little blown away," said new Nebraska coach Bo Pelini, a former Cornhusker defensive coordinator. "But it comes back around. You might win games by throwing up points, but the team that will win in the long run will have success on defense."

That's a valid point. The Big 12's top three teams in scoring defense last season -- Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri -- were BCS worthy. But none of those teams allowed less than 16 points a game. As recently as 1996, Nebraska allowed only 11.8.

What in the name of Broderick Thomas, the Selmon brothers and Tommy Nobis has happened?

Well, you can blame Mike Leach. Not entirely, of course, but if you're looking for reasons that the Big 12 now is as wide open as Dodge City in the 1880s, he's your guy.

Leach arrived at Texas Tech in 2000 with a wide-open spread offense, determined to do what underdogs need to do -- find a gimmick offense that your opponents can't handle, and defensively just try to keep their point total respectable.

Leach succeeded. His Red Raiders are the only team to go to a bowl game every single season of the league's existence.

Leach shrugs at the balance of power.

"There's not some magic answer," he said. "You just have to keep improving. The scheme is important but the execution is more important than the scheme."

It all puts inordinate pressures on defensive coordinators. Most schools have gone for guys who can bring Xs alive. Of the 12 league head coaches, only Chizik and Pelini have defensive pedigrees.

The problem college coaches find now is that the high school kids who used to dream of being a shutdown corner are intoxicated with the numbers they can post as a wide receiver in a spread offense. They don't want to be embarrassed. They want to embarrass.

"A lot of high school players now want to be catching the ball and scoring," Gundy said.

"There's a lot of offensive ball in high school," Prince said. "It's different from a generation ago. From a recreational standpoint, even in intramurals, most guys are running pass patterns. So everybody wants to be QB or receiver. It wasn't so long ago you had to project quarterbacks and receivers."

Prince shrugs, almost wistfully, conceding, "Defenses had the leg up for so long."

Defenses found an answer to the Wishbone, in sets where their DBs aligned in a three-deep, quarter/quarter/half alignment. They figured out the run-and-shoot by allowing the receivers to catch the ball, and then knocking the snot out of them.

They even coped with the West Coast offense, which relies on avoiding mistakes and slowly moving the chains, by jumping routes and roughing up the receivers.

"As usual in this game, people steal good ideas," Prince said. "The spread offense goes a lot of different ways and directions. College and high school football is different than the NFL, where everybody runs the same thing."

Everybody says football is cyclical. Every time an offense jumps ahead, the defenses eventually catch up. Or so history says.

"There are ways to combat what is the heart and soul of the spread offense, but I'm not going to say them," said Kansas coach Mark Mangino. "Offenses come up with something -- defenses come up with a counter punch. That's what makes college football so great."

Slowly, Big 12 defensive coordinators are coping.

The Spread. They're slowly figuring it out. Zone blitzes ... disguising coverages ... giving the QB more to think about than he can process.

Pelini, for his part, thinks things actually could be worse for the defense.

"As long as we don't get to the NFL rule, where you can't put your hands on a receiver, we'll still have some advantages in the passing game," he said.

And the news does not get better for Big 12 defensive coaches. This season, with nearly every team returning its starting quarterback -- guys like Kansas' Todd Reesing, Missouri's Chase Daniel, Texas' Colt McCoy, Tech's Graham Harrell and Oklahoma's Sam Bradford -- the offenses figure to be even more explosive.

"The overall strength of all the quarterbacks," said OU coach Bob Stoops, "makes the league stronger, even more so this year."

And in the esoteric world of schemes, fronts and game plans, there remains one undeniable truth.

It comes down to points.

"I just want one more," said first-year Baylor coach Art Briles, "than the other guy."

(For more college football coverage, visit www.lindysports.com.)