By: Austin Siegel
The man who scored the first touchdown in Big 12 history was listening to sports talk radio in his car, when he realized he was the answer to a trivia question – to that trivia question.
He listened as fans called in to the show with their answers, names steeped in Big 8 and Southwest Conference nostalgia.
Mike Lawrence? Nope. Kevin Lockett? Incorrect. Others tried names like Zebbie Lethridge or Byron Hanspard.
"It just went on and on before someone finally got it," Brian Kavanagh said. "You know you're officially washed up when you're the answer to a trivia question that no one can answer."
It was 25 seasons ago that Kavanagh's second quarter touchdown helped lead K-State to a win in one of the more unique moments in program history, when the Wildcats hosted Texas Tech in the first game, across any sport, in the history of the Big 12 Conference.
Not many college football fans mark their calendars for a conference anniversary, but at least in Manhattan, those 25 years also represent the awakening of a once dormant program.
In fact, the fortunes of Kansas State and the Big 12 have been so closely tied since then, a whole generation of fans have grown up assuming the Wildcats have always played Texas Tech.
Max Urick knows that couldn't be further from the truth.
The athletic director at K-State from 1993 to 2001, Urick helped steer the Wildcats through this pivotal moment in the history of the school and the athletic programs that help make it special.
There aren't many figures in the history of college football like Urick, who coached alongside Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler at Ohio State in the early 1960's.
Even fewer could apologize for getting "off-topic" talking about coaching with two of the greatest minds in the sport and get back to the meetings where a super-conference was born.
"It all came down to making our bones, getting to bowl games, generating access to more resources and improving the facilities," Urick said. "This may not be interesting to anybody but me, but the first thing we did with that money was build new restrooms. The restrooms at the old stadium were from the Ice Age."
The first serious talks about expanding the Big 8 came in the late 1980's, when Arkansas expressed interested in joining the conference. The move made sense geographically, but Big 8 leaders decided that the Razorbacks wouldn't add anything the conference didn't already have.
At this point, Urick was still the athletic director at Iowa State, but the "tremors" of conference expansion were beginning to shake throughout the Big 8.
"Things were really slow to change at that time," he said. "There were no computers, it was all through phones or in-person meetings, which took time. There was no sense of urgency."
And why would there be? In the final decade of the Big 8, three member schools - Oklahoma, Colorado and Nebraska - claimed four national championships in football and the conference wasn't exactly struggling with national relevance.
The football team at K-State was a different story.
Kavanagh was a promising high school quarterback from the Chicago suburbs who was attracting interest from Big Ten schools, but the phones stopped ringing after injuries derailed his senior year.
That's when Kavanagh got a letter in the mail right before Christmas.
"I knew about the Big 8 because I had watched Oklahoma and Nebraska growing up," he said. "I got this letter from Kansas State with the Big 8 logo and I was like, 'Kansas State? What?' Then I realized that I could only come up with seven other schools, so they must be the eighth team in the conference."
Kavanagh said that playing football at Kansas wasn't uncommon for talented high school players from Chicagoland – heading further west down I-70 to Manhattan was a different story.
"Like many of the guys who came in when I came in, we weren't huge recruits out of high school," former Wildcat and NFL wideout Kevin Lockett said. "I think Coach Snyder did a really good job bringing guys in who were hungry, that had a chip on their shoulder and felt like they had something to prove."
Growing up in Oklahoma, Lockett had eyed SMU as he prepared for his college football career, but when he didn't initially receive a scholarship, Lockett headed north to Kansas State.
Both Kavanagh and Lockett arrived when Snyder had the Wildcats on the verge of a breakthrough. The fifth-year head coach would lead K-State to the school's first bowl victory and a nine-win season in 1993.
Urick, the new athletic director in Manhattan, was thinking even bigger. The same month that K-State won the 1993 Copper Bowl, discussions between the Big 8 and Southwest Conference were underway.
"We had received word that Texas A&M and Texas were getting concerned about the commitment of other Southwest Conference schools to athletics in general," Urick said. "And then, word leaked out about the ABC and ESPN television deal."
Texas A&M was the biggest hitter in the Southwest Conference of the early 90's, and along with Texas, beginning to distance themselves from the rest of the conference when it came to football.
The fears of the Longhorns and Aggies were confirmed in December of 1993, when Urick remembers a discussion about a possible TV deal for the new conference with ABC and ESPN.
Long story short? The Big 8 would earn the same TV revenue from adding Texas and Texas A&M, whether or not they included Texas Tech and Baylor in the deal. There was just one problem.
"We learned that Texas and Texas A&M could not move forward without Texas Tech and Baylor. Ann Richards was the governor of Texas and a Baylor alum. She was not going to do anything that didn't improve Baylor's status," Urick said. "Then we found out the Chair of the State Appropriations Committee was a Texas Tech graduate. The politics were obvious."
Urick credited the faculty athletic representatives at Kansas State with helping the school understand what joining the new conference would mean, even beyond sports.
As the schools hammered out the details behind the new conference, the consequences of adding the four Texas schools to the Big 8 became even more clear on the field in 1995.
K-State was coming off their best season in 85 years, and in any other year, the Wildcats would have been expected to contend in the conference when college football returned in 1996.
But this wasn't any other season.
The Big 8 was about to welcome No. 14 Texas, No. 15 Texas A&M, No. 23 Texas Tech and a seven-win Baylor team. And it all kicked off in Manhattan on August 31, 1996.
Despite coming off a 10-win season in 1995, Lockett remembers what most of the country thought about how the Texas programs would change the balance of power in the newly-formed Big 12.
"Most people thought they would come in and dominate everyone except Oklahoma, Nebraska and possibly Colorado," Lockett said. "I think they thought the rest of us, the other five schools, were just going to get run over like a Mack truck."
Kavanagh spent much of that summer answering questions that seemed a little ridiculous for the quarterback of a team that had been ranked No. 7 in the country a season ago.
"I remember talking to the reporters that covered these Texas schools and the question consistently was something along the lines of, 'How are you guys going to be able to compete with these teams?'" he said. "I was finally like, 'OK we get it, you guys are good, but we play a little football here too.'"
When Texas Tech arrived in Manhattan on that warm, late August afternoon, the narrative surrounding the nationally-televised game was a top-25 matchup pitting a K-State defense that was the nation's best in 1995 against Tech's potent ground game.
If you ever need to win an argument with your Big Ten or SEC friends about conference clichés, just remind them that the first game in Big 12 history was a defensive battle featuring a Texas Tech team that loved to run the football.
The game itself was a grind for both teams, as Texas Tech won the possession battle but let the Wildcats control the game on defense and special teams.
"We all know Kansas in August. It was hot. Offensively, it wasn't our sharpest game of the season and we left the defense out on the field for a lot of snaps," Kavanagh said. "I remember those guys being gassed."
After the Red Raiders took the lead on the first points in Big 12 history – a 53-yard field goal – K-State marched to the one-yard line where Kavanagh made a little bit of history. But it was a 29-yard grab by Lockett that got the Wildcats in the red zone, one of three catches on the drive.
Kavanagh's touchdown put the Wildcats up early and the first passing TD in Big 12 history, a 17-yard connection between Kavanagh and wide receiver Jimmy Dean made it 14-3 at the half.
"It sort of felt like a non-conference game, but we knew there was a little bit more at stake," Lockett said. "It felt like a moment to, once again, solidify the program. When I look back at my five years at K-State, tying Colorado my redshirt freshman year was momentous, beating OU four years in a row was another big step. The Texas Tech game to kick off the Big 12 was another moment where we had the opportunity to do something special."
In the second half, the Wildcats defense turned in a bend-but-don't break performance, holding Tech to 14 points on the afternoon, despite 103 offensive snaps from the Red Raiders.
The K-State defense came up with a huge fourth down stop in the closing minutes on their own 13-yard line to preserve the 21-14 win.
"In a lot of ways, it was just a blue-collar K-State win," Kavanagh said. "We did enough offensively, I think we had a special teams touchdown, blocked a field goal, the defense played great and made a play at the end to seal it. It was the quintessential, Coach Snyder K-State win."
Given the focus of K-State's athletic director on improving the restrooms at KSU Stadium, maybe it's fitting that Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes delivered his televised, postgame press conference shirtless and wrapped in a towel in front of a bathroom stall in the visiting locker room.
It was also a moment that, 25 years on, marked the beginning of a conference that K-State has helped define through a quarter century of college football.
Consider that the Wildcats didn't have a decade with more than one winning season from the 1950's to the 1990's.
Since the Big 12 arrived, K-State has won a pair of conference titles, achieved a No. 1 ranking in the country in 1998 and 2012 and became just the second team in the history of college football to win 11 or more games six times in seven years.
It all started with one down-to the-wire win over Texas Tech.
"It was historic, and you just didn't know in the moment, how historic it was going to be," Urick said. "It really vaulted us to a new level of achievement, possibility and confidence."
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