Before the Big Eight Conference greedily gobbled four Lone $tar $tate universities and became the Big Dozen, almost everything was simpler.

Every May, for example, league and school administrators would gather at the site of the outdoor track and field championships to conduct meetings, play golf and, most important, count the TV and bowl money.

However, in the latter years of the Big Eight and into the era of the Big 12, the league’s cities were abandoned and such high-dollar places as Vail, Colo., and such ritzy joints as the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs were tapped for the annual May meetings.

At least those sites were in the conference area. This May’s meetings were staged at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya in Santa Ana Pueblo, N.M., a pricey resort and spa located between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Such carpetbagging leads to speculation the Big 12 is interested in expanding into New Mexico. And why not? Expansion is where the money is in college athletics because the more television sets you can supply, the more money you can command from networks eager to fill air time with sports events.

Most people think of New Mexico as having more armadillos and jackrabbits than boob tubes, yet it’s no secret the Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor is growing at a rapid pace which means, at the same time, the number of TV sets are, too.

I can see Albuquerque-based New Mexico U. as the 13th member of the Big 12 Conference, but I can’t envision the league adding just one more university. More likely, the Big 12 would also need to add a school to its northern tier, too, to maintain a semblance of balance.

Colorado State would seem to be the leading candidate to fill that role, but the Big 12 already has the Centennial State in the fold with Colorado, so the league may want to branch into, say, Utah. Memo to Wyoming: Forget it. Thirteen TV sets aren’t enough.

What I’d really like to see, though, is a Big 16 Conference with eight schools in the south and eight in the north. Ideally, the additional schools would be TCU and New Mexico in the south and Utah and Colorado State in the north.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Big 12 Conference has a disturbing inequity between its north and south schools, particularly in spring sports.

Let’s use baseball as an example of what could be done to improve competitive balance. During the regular season, each school would play only members of its own division. In the postseason, the league baseball tournament would be composed of the top four teams in each division. In that way, the north schools would have hope. This spring, the six southern schools finished one through six in the league standings.

Kansas, for instance, won six of nine games from the three other north schools that still sponsor baseball, but the Jayhawks lost 16 of their 17 games against the six schools from Texas and Oklahoma.

As it stands now, the baseball future isn’t bright for Kansas, Kansas State, Nebraska and Missouri in the current Big 12. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but warm weather is a weighty recruiting weapon. Further proof can be found in the small number of cold-weather schools that annually make it to the College World Series.

Kansas, Kansas State, Nebraska and Missouri would have more of a competitive baseball edge with indoor stadiums, but who is going to pay that kind of freight? All four schools’ stadiums have had recent upgrades. In classy Haymarket Park, Nebraska may, in fact, have the best baseball stadium in the Big 12, but Lincoln winters last longer than Lubbock’s.

The Big 12’s north-south disparity wasn’t as pronounced in softball this spring, but you’ll still find the Texas and Oklahoma schools hogging the upper division of the standings in golf, tennis and outdoor track.

Still, as long as the money keeps rolling in, who really cares about the non-revenue sports?