If you like Oral Histories, here’s one about the formation of the Big 12 from Sports Illustrated:
‘EVERYBODY’S LOOKING FOR TV SETS’: THE ORAL HISTORY OF THE FORMATION OF THE BIG 12 CONFERENCE
http://www.campusrush.com/big-12-conference-oral-history-swc-merger-1974972078.html
Some of it is BS due to who’s talking (Cunningham & Dodds), some of it is interesting, here’s a few tidbits:
Cunningham: There were four or five forces that forced change. They had everything to do with Rice and TCU and Houston not being able to draw acceptable crowds. The death penalty to SMU played a huge role. SMU was potentially the school that we could have developed a long-term rivalry with.
Snyder, to reporters in August 1990: My idea is that we take the bottom half of the Southwest Conference, and the bottom half of the Big Eight Conference and we merge them. … We take ourselves, Kansas perhaps, maybe Oklahoma State, perhaps Missouri or Iowa State. Then we take the same group out of the Southwest Conference—TCU, SMU, maybe Houston, Rice, perhaps Texas Tech. We put them all together and we contract a bowl game.
Sibley: The interesting part of this is that if this had happened two years earlier, the lieutenant governor would have been a University of Houston person and the speaker of the house would have been a TCU person. It really was an interesting confluence of events.
Castiglione: It was our impression that the four institutions from the Southwest Conference would be Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Houston.