MORGANTOWN — It could have been Daniel Boone at the Alamo, considering that it was deep in the heart — and the heat — of Texas as the man in the coonskin cap toting the rifle walked right up to Bob Stoops, the Oklahoma coach, and said, “We’ll see you at our place on Nov. 17.”

Stoops looked Jonathon Kimble, the WVU Mountaineer mascot, right in the eyes and said, “We’ll be there.”

And so it began, this first-ever Big 12 media day for West Virginia. The mascot was joined by the league’s other mascots and there were cheerleaders anywhere you looked as the festivities began.

It was a strange beginning, in the first place, for this was a celebratory time for the Big 12, yet it was starting just an hour after the NCAA had come down upon Penn State, once one of his glamor locations, and dropped an atomic bomb of penalties on it for its lack of institutional control in the Jerry Sandusky child molestation mess.

That, of course, was a historic moment in college sports history, the NCAA venturing into areas it never before really had gone and done so swiftly and with a vengeance, leaving Joe Paterno’s name ruined and the program facing disaster if not destruction.

Bob Bowlsby, the new Big 12 commissioner, wanted no part of commenting on what had transpired, considering that he really hadn’t had a chance to delve into the depths of the situation, but he did admit that the NCAA is hardly known for the swiftness with which it acted in this case.

“‘Acting quickly’ and ‘NCAA’ are not always mentioned in the same sentence,” he said.

Bowlsby had his bragging shoes on, to say nothing of the same tie he wore the day he was introduced as the conference’s new commissioner, but why not do a little bragging, consider the conference was rescued from the brink of extinction just a year back and now seems to be positioned as the second strongest football conference behind the SEC.

Certainly there are no other conferences that possess three reigning conference champions — defending Big 12 title holder Oklahoma State, Big East champion WVU and Mountain West champion TCU — to say nothing of six teams that won 10 or more games last season.

What’s more it is a conference in power position as it negotiates a new television contract, something that is not as far along as he would like it to be, and a conference that has just signed on to match its champion against the SEC champion in the Champion Bowl, which he indicated would probably wind up played as part of an existing bowl (the Cotton Bowl is the favorite on New Year’s night after the Rose Bowl).

“I think the Champions Bowl put us on a par with the Rose Bowl, the long tradition that the Big 12 or the Big Ten and the Pac-12 have had in that bowl,” he said. “That’s what we want the Champions Bowl to become, and I think we have a great chance to do that. There are going to be years when our champion is not in the top four and we’ll play in those years a great opponent in the Champions Bowl.”

And if the champion from either conference is in a playoff situation, that does not diminish the Champions Bowl much, according to Bowlsby.

“Our runner-up in the Big 12 and a runner-up in the SEC is still a pretty darned good football game. So there are going to be some years when we meet head to head. There are going to be some years when we don’t,” he said.

“I think that’s the same thing could be said about the Rose Bowl. And that’s a tradeoff you make when you build a playoff system within the bowl system.”

But there is so much more than just a bowl game here. There is a TV contract being worked out, one that will move the Big 12 into the upper echelon of college football and even sports in America.

“I don’t have any question that we will end up with a completed media document before long,” he said. “But it is long. It is dense, and it has lots of details. And it’s still going to take us a while to get it all put together.

“It’s been a painstaking process, but I expect in the end we will have a 13-year grant of rights on television,” the commissioner continued. “We will have a 13-year grant of rights to cover the 12 years that are envisioned with the Champions Bowl, and we will end up with a package that will give us national exposure on two cable and broadcast television giants.”

And he believes it will be worth the effort.

“It’s going to be unprecedented national exposure for our conference, and it will be remarkable the breadth and depth of the reach that we will have during the course of the coming decade,” Bowlsby said. “I also think that in addition to the strength and the revenue that is derived from a major media contract, we really are headed for a period of stability. It’s been a painstaking process, but I expect in the end we will have a 13-year grant of rights on television.”

The stability is important, for college football is in need of some time to absorb its changes now and Bowlsby says he sees no expansion on the part of the Big 12 in the near future.

“This is a group of 10 institutions that if we were to press for raised hands in a meeting room around the issue of expansion, I don’t know that we’d get two votes for moving to a larger number,” he said. “Now, having said that, expansion is on every conference’s list of discussion items. I don’t think we can ever afford not to think about it.

“But if the Big 12 had to vote on it today, we wouldn’t take any new members in. We believe it should be very difficult to get into this group of institutions. It should be the toughest fraternity in America to join, and the only people that have a chance to join it are those that bring something that is very substantial.”

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com. Follow on Twitter @bhertzel.