<table> </table> Predictions satisfy fans&#8217; passion and feed the news cycles, but expressions of what might happen this college football season are empty calories.</p><p>So what that Missouri and Oklahoma are picked to win Big 12 divisions, or that Tigers quarterback Chase Daniel and Sooners defensive end Auston English are believed to be the top players?</p><p>Let&#8217;s see who&#8217;s standing in December. Besides, you think Kansas bought into its fourth-place projection last year?</p><p>Still, we&#8217;re such suckers for this stuff that every major college football conference over the next nine days will share prophecies. Big 12 programs have checked into the Kansas City Downtown Marriott and today begin three days of fortune telling.</p><p>Kansas City gets the blitz known as Big 12 Media Days because Arrowhead Stadium is site of the conference championship game, but it&#8217;s appropriate that Cowtown gets the league&#8217;s first dateline of 2008 after what happened last year.</p><p>Pardon the shill, but the Big 12 enjoys favored status &#8212; widely regarded as the No. 2 power conference behind the Southeastern Conference &#8212; because of the seasons turned in by the two schools closest to 1 Arrowhead Drive: Kansas and Missouri.</p><p>From a conference standpoint, the Jayhawks and Tigers combining for 24 victories, two pride-swelling bowl triumphs and their most memorable regular-season showdown ever in 2007, had this effect: It made the Big 12 whole.</p><p>League strength once again stretches into the Great Plains, where it started when the Big 12 opened for business. Then, Nebraska was winding up the greatest five-year run in college football history with Kansas State nipping at the Huskers&#8217; heels until its 1998 breakthrough year.</p><p>Meanwhile, Texas and Oklahoma went a combined 22-26 in conference games in the first three years and 6-12 against North schools.</p><p>The tide turned with coaching changes. Mack Brown and Bob Stoops in and Tom Osborne out, and the imbalance got ugly during 2002-06. Things bottomed out in 2004 when the North went 3-0 against Baylor and 0-15 against the rest of the South.</p><p>Power shifts are typical, coaches kept saying, but they were being good conference soldiers. Nothing was balanced about the Big 12. Football Taj Mahals, er, facilities, were funded in the South, not the North. Budgets swelled in the South, programs that already had easier access to the vast Texas high school talent pools.</p><p>For years, a North all-star team couldn&#8217;t have beaten Oklahoma or Texas &#8212; and the conference was weaker overall for it.</p><p>Then the darndest thing happened in 2007. Missouri and Kansas toughened up, pushed all the right buttons and pulled a division along with them. Besides the Tigers and Jayhawks finishing with conference-best 7-1 records, Colorado beat Oklahoma. Kansas State defeated Texas for a second straight year, and balance returned to the Big 12 and delivered perhaps its greatest season with:</p><p>&#8226;A bowl record of 5-3, matching the best in league history.</p><p>&#8226;Eight consensus All-Americans, the most of any conference and most in Big 12 history.</p><p>&#8226;Four teams in the final top 10, matching another league best.</p><p>Only a national championship eluded the haul, and if Missouri had defeated the Sooners in the conference championship game the Tigers would have gotten the title shot.</p><p>Signs are that this is no one-year deal because North schools have determined that when they couldn&#8217;t beat the South, they had to join them. Coaches Mark Mangino ($2.3 million) and Gary Pinkel ($1.85 million) make serious coin, ranking third and fourth on the Big 12 list.</p><p>Prospects no longer smirk when touring facilities in the North. The new digs in Lawrence would be the envy of the NFL. This is what it takes to compete nationally, which is what it takes to compete in the Big 12.</p><p>Is balance here to stay? The Big 12 should hope so, but we can talk about it. That&#8217;s what this week is about.