History Lesson: The Decline and Fall of the Southwest Conference (article from 1974)

The numbers are smaller, but so many of the issues are exactly the same. This is a really interesting long-form piece about how the big schools were getting frustrated with the perceived caps on their potential that came from being "stuck" with their smaller regional rivals. To be fair, it also goes into how those rivals were indeed tempted to coast on the big schools' investment and attention. Same writer did a brief follow-up twenty-years later when the SWC finally announced it was done.