Great take, but se won the Big XII in 1999. This will be our 20th year without a conference championship.
That written, think about the simple mathematic reality of winning a conference championship in an eight-team conference versus a 14-team conference. That alone changes these data slightly.
Winning a six- or seven-team division title in this era of parity AND NO CO-CHAMPIONS is equivalent to winning a conference championship in an eight-team conference that included Kansas State (before Snyder) or a 10-team conference that included historically awful programs such as Northwestern (before Barnett), Indiana (before Mallory) and Wisconsin (before Alvarez).
Nebraska alone claimed conference titles in the following years despite not beating the team in tied with, seasons that we wouldn't be allowed to claim as titles under the current set-up:
- 1969 (Missouri)
- 1972 (Oklahoma)
- 1975 (Oklahoma)
- 1984 (Oklahoma)
- 1991 (tie game with Colorado)
By the same token, we didn't get credit for a division title in years where we tied for first in six-team divisions because only the winner of the game got to play in the conference title game, seasons that under past policies, we could have claimed as titles:
- 2000 (Kansas State)
- 2001 (Colorado)
- 2008 (Missouri)
The simple math says that in an era where eight or nine power conferences crowned a total of at least eight or nine champions (and often more, in the case of ties — see "Iowa"), it was easier to win a conference championship.
TLDR: Conference championships and the length between them should be measured differently before 1992 (SEC), 1996 (Big XII), 2005 (ACC), and 2011 (Pac-12 and Big Ten).
