From the Roundtable: MU, and local economy, dodges realignment bullet

The college athletic conference realignment scenario that almost cascaded this month proved to be a close call for the Columbia area business community.
Although the media generally ignored possible economic consequences of an upheaval, business and government leaders were sweating bullets over the future of the region’s economy if MU was left out of a major conference.
The conventional wisdom was that there would be four 16-member “super conferences” that could operate independent of the NCAA. Then MU was snubbed by the Big 10, which picked Nebraska instead and then looked to eastern schools. Five of the six Texas colleges in the Big 12 South were invited to join a Pac 10 super conference. MU faced the prospect of having to join the Mountain West, far from a super conference.
Talk about dampening the recent fillip of development success with the announcement, “IBM is coming!”
But as it turned out, the Big 10 held pat, and the Texans decided to stay.
We who ply our trade in business, and this includes the business of government, burst forth with a big sigh of relief when we learned that the Big 12 Conference — sans Colorado and Nebraska — would remain intact and that MU would see a bump in its revenues from television.
The major driver of the realignment strategy was television revenue for football programs. That’s a far cry from 60 years ago when television, just emerging from the chrysalis, was frequently banned from the sidelines because claims were made that it was hurting the box office gate. Today, video distribution rights and fees are really all that matters as FOX, ESPN and others offer packages to university athletic programs worth multiple millions of dollars.
The athletic program at MU, the state’s premier public university, has generally held its own nationally among an elite group of, say, 60 institutions competitive in football, the principal profit center. It dwarfs basketball revenue, and the rest of the sports generally lose money.
The consequences go beyond economic if the University of Missouri had been grafted into a lesser conference. We would have been worrying about reduced prestige, diminished enrollment and how we might feel overall about the institution. For now, we are spared.
The University of Missouri’s birthright going back to 1839, enhanced some 25 years later under the Morrell Act, as the state’s only Land Grant university must never be trampled upon.
Now, we should focus on how the nickname “Mizzou” has been blown out of proportion and frequently supplants what should proudly be displayed on all fronts: The University of Missouri, or Missouri for short.
With this recent close shave behind them, the now somewhat chastened athletic department needs to replace Mizzou with Missouri on all jerseys and other articles of team clothing lest we lose this important matter of our birthright and heritage to another institution. (Missouri State has reduced the size of the word State on its jerseys, which adds to the confusion.)
The University of Missouri Board of Curators in 2007 voted unanimously to recognize the historic status of MU and the flagship campus by dropping the hyphen and the word Columbia in written communications.
But then a few years ago the Missouri Alumni Association changed its name to the Mizzou Alumni Association because a survey showed it was the favorite nickname.
Nicknames are fine, but this is the University of Missouri we’re talking about, and that goes back 171 years.
There must be no confusion about what the University of Missouri is and the fact that its original founding campus is located here in the city of Columbia. “Mizzou” is a great nickname, and there are plenty of applications for it. Licensed team clothing and other products is where the use of Mizzou needs to end.