Puh-leeeeeze.
Texas and Okalhoma are great teams, but the Big 12's mid-tier teams are just as mediocre as those in any other conference. A&M lost to Baylor, for crying out loud.
My point remains that there is a strong, fan-supported winning football tradition at Southern Miss and none at Kansas. The fact that KU has been Oklahoma's (and Nebraska's...and Kansas State's...and Colorado's...and even Missouri's...and hell's bells, Iowa State kicks Kansas' ass on a regular basis) perennial doormat for 50 years carries no weight with me or any other knowledgeable college football fan.
The good mid-major teams - and Southern Miss is one of them - are as good or better than many major conference mid-tier teams. Southern Miss (or Utah or Louisville or Cincinnati or TCU) would fare just fine in the middle of the Big 12 pack. Kansas would still suck in any conference - even the Big LEast.
Kansas (or Duke or Indiana or Vanderbilt or Baylor or fill-in-your-favorite-loser-program-here) football is a joke. They have been and will likely remain the "major" cupcakes that other schools seek out to schedule in non-conference play. There isn't an athletic director in the country that feels that way about Southern Miss.
p.s. It's hard for me to have any good feelings about the Big 12 with their larceny of Cal's BCS spot. Four coaches in the final AP poll voted Cal 7th and two coaches voted Cal 8th. During the previous month, ALL coaches voted Cal at least 6th or better. Cal and the Pac10 have called for the AP coach's ballots to be made public.
What is nearly certain, but is not being said directly, is that 6 Big 12 coaches changed their votes to put Texas in the BCS and bring home a $12-15 million BCS payment for the Big 12 conference to divvy up among its members.
If I were a coach, AD or univeristy president from any other conference, I would be screaming bloody murder and demanding AP ballots be made public next year.
The only reason this "larceny" was even necessary was because of the tweaking done after last season to put more weight on the polls (the absolute worst method in history for determining an athletic champion) rather than the computer rankings. Any objective measure (as opposed to the popularity contest method of the polls) of analyzing the two teams ranks Texas ahead of Cal. Comparing the Cal's difficult victory over Southern Miss to Texas comeback against Kansas is silly, because you have to look at the overall season. Texas played a tougher schedule than Cal (based on the overall winning percentages of the teams that each played). Cal and Texas both lost to teams that have a legitimate claim to being the number 1 team in the nation. The computer averages rank OU as 1 and USC as 2, while the popularity contests rank USC 1 and OU 2. You disdain the computer averages, while I think the polls are tremendously flawed by the fact that polls start before the season ever starts which builds a bias into the teams that are ranked at the top in the preseason polls.
As for the mighty USC, if not for an over-anxious whistle that blew a play dead when the receiver was not anywhere near being down, UCLA would have had a fumble return for a touchdown that well might have changed the outcome of that game. Your contempt for the Big XII is somewhat similar to what I feel toward the PAC-10 and the left-coast bias in the polls that tends to overinflate the poll rankings for teams from that conference year after year.