The glamour gave way to the process.

Members from nine MIAA schools already boxed up their media guides, picked up their token helmets and left the Arrowhead Stadium Club for their respective towns. The conference’s staff turned off the big screen projector, took down the MIAA’s banner — emblazoned with the league’s new logo — and packed up the 2008 championship trophy. The Stadium Club’s staff cleared the final remnants of the MIAA’s football luncheon — some crumpled up napkins and water glasses.

The only remaining signs of the conference’s annual media gathering were a lone, red helmet with an O logo on the side, sitting at a table just to the left of the podium — where the MIAA showcased its newest member front and center just an hour earlier. And one last coach sat in the corner, conducting a couple of final interviews in a day filled with too many to keep track of.

Welcome to the MIAA, Nebraska-Omaha.

Omaha’s campus sits in a metro area more than four times bigger than the next largest MIAA city. UNO has the highest enrollment of any MIAA school, and the Mavericks bring their $8.2 million athletic budget — the largest in the conference.

So naturally, every member of the media wanted a quote from the Mavericks’ football coach, Pat Behrns, wondering what kind of mark UNO is set to make on the conference’s landscape. Behrns, entering his 15th year with the school, obliged, answering questions long after the lights went down on media day. The glamour was gone, but the Mavericks remained.

——— ★ ★ ★ ———

Scientists likely would blame Jerry Wollmering’s receding hairline on genetics. The Truman State athletic director blames it on the MIAA.

Wollmering watched as Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri S&T) left the conference in 2004, and Southwest Baptist did the same in football after last season. Those two schools had something in common with Truman in that they had higher academic standards than the rest of the MIAA and fewer resources — a two-fold handicap that had Rolla and Baptist finishing in the conference’s last three spots nine times from 1995-2004.

In 2003, when Rolla went 0-11, the Miners funded just 19 of its 36 allowable scholarships. Endowments have allowed the university to raise that number to the 30s the past couple of seasons, and the Miners also funded about $725,000 in improvements to its facilities.

But that’s peanuts compared to Pittsburg State, Northwest Missouri State, Central Missouri or Washburn — all of which have invested anywhere from $5.5 million to $11 million in their respective stadiums during the past 13 years.

The administration in Rolla eventually decided it didn’t care to compete in the MIAA’s emerging arms race.

“We just weren’t willing,” Cannon said. “This is a successful school and has the resources to do what they want, but a lot of our unrestricted funds went into other things.”

Some of that money went to fund the construction of a solar car, to cite one example.

Now, Baptist is roaming the independent ranks with Missouri S&T. Into the Bearcats’ place steps Nebraska-Omaha, which went undefeated during the 2007 regular season while averaging 7,576 fans and raised $400,000 in corporate sponsorships last year.

Meanwhile, in Joplin, Missouri Southern recently formed a committee to figure out what to do with Hughes Stadium, which was built in 1975. It recommended that Southern just tear down the stands and press box and start over — a pricey proposition for a school that raises about $20,000 privately each year to supplement the football program.

“Who knows where it’s going to stop? It could happen to us someday,” Wollmering said of leaving the conference. “There are no shortages of challenges for us here at Truman. That’s why I’m losing my hair.”

The Bulldogs were a founding member of the MIAA in 1912 and are doing what they can to keep up. Truman State passed a student fee that will raise about $550,000 annually. Using that money, Truman installed new lights and FieldTurf at Stokes Stadium at a $1.4 million cost.

But that investment only will give Truman what the other nine schools in the conference already have — and not even in time for the Bulldogs’ fall practice or non-conference schedule thanks to construction delays.

“We’ve just spent $1.4 million,” Wollmering said, “and it’s not like we are ahead of anybody.”

——— ★ ★ ★ ———

Pittsburg State spent $1.7 million on facility upgrades this summer, and the Gorillas now are ahead of everybody.

That money funded a new video board — a 40-feet by nearly 70-feet Daktronics display that will be the largest in any U.S. Division II stadium.

When Mel Tjeerdsma came to Northwest Missouri State in 1994, there was Pittsburg and then everyone else. The Bearcats had some of the worst facilities in the conference, by Tjeerdsma’s estimation. But using a student fund, Northwest underwent a $1 million renovation to its field, starting a period of improvement and expansion to Bearcat Stadium that only now is stopping. Northwest’s more than $11 million in improvements transformed the facility from one of the conference’s worst to one of Division II’s best.

Those upgrades included a video board in 2003.

“It was the nicest there was in D-II when we put it up,” said Dr. Bob Boerigter, Northwest’s athletic director. “But it’s not the biggest and best today.”

Since 1995, Central Missouri spent $5.5 million on new stands with another $2 million renovation in the works. Pittsburg poured $5.7 million into Carnie Smith Stadium in 2001 for new club seating and luxury boxes and then added eight more sky boxes in 2006.

“We try, as athletic departments, to bring (other team’s upgrades) to light,” Washburn coach Craig Schurig said. “If we don’t keep pace, we are going to fall by the wayside of the Rollas.”

Washburn’s version of keeping up with the proverbial Jones included a $4.25 million upgrade to its press box, the addition of luxury suites in 2003 and a $400,000 locker room renovation. The Ichabods also are in the process of building training and weight facility as part of a larger $7 million renovation.

And in a process that seems to be perpetually feeding itself, this summer Missouri Western announced at least a $5.6 million renovation to Spratt Stadium.

Every MIAA school has a FieldTurf surface now, and luxury suites and video boards are making their niche in the conference as well. So where does the arms race among the top half of the conference stop?

“Someone is going to have an indoor facility, and then the next school is going to want it,” Schurig said.

In fact, Northwest officials already have discussed that possibility on multiple occasions. Boerigter would like a multi-purpose facility that could house summer and winter workouts for football, soccer, baseball, softball and track. The Bearcats athletic director also heard that St. Cloud University purchased a portable dome that takes two days to set up over its football field.

Either is just a wish at this point, but so was a 70-foot scoreboard just a few years ago, which reminds Boerigter of another “wish.”

“You want to keep everything state-of-the-art,” he said. “We know in due time we will have to upgrade our scoreboard.”

——— ★ ★ ★ ———

On the field, Omaha was every bit Northwest’s equal last season, beating the Bearcats and rising to a No. 1 ranking. But when it comes to resources, the Mavericks paint themselves as a Truman, Southern, Emporia State or Western in spite of that $8.2 million budget — not another big-money program coming to accelerate the conference’s facility boom.

While Omaha’s Caniglia Field seats 9,500 — more than any other facility except Central’s Walton Stadium — it isn’t a shining example of modern stadia.

Misuse of athletic department funds led to the dismissal of Nebraska-Omaha’s chancellor, vice chancellor and athletic director in 2006. The subsequent investigation brought to light a department operating at a $1.6 million deficit, according to Behrns.

New athletic director David Miller has spent his 14 months at the school trimming the budget and trying to raise enough additional revenue to get the Mavericks back to even. Right now, the Mavs are operating at a $900,000 deficit, and Miller thinks his department won’t get out of the red for another three to four years.

Omaha also is in the unique situation of having a Division I hockey program, which costs about $1.8 million annually and only raises about $47,000 in revenue for the athletic department each year.

Ideally, Omaha would like to use the hockey team to pay for its women’s programs, but that goal has yet to be realized.

“We have our own struggles,” Miller said. “We can’t cut anymore. We just need to generate more revenue.”

But until the Mavericks figure out how to do that — especially with Division I Nebraska and Creighton to compete with when it comes to donors’ dollars — any facility upgrades that would bring the program on par with Washburn, Northwest, Pittsburg or Central Missouri exist only in the hypothetical realm.

“Until we get those things behind us, you can’t do anything, we are just doing the best things we can to maintain,” Behrns said.

Omaha will force schools to spend more — on travel. As diesel costs continue to rise, Emporia State athletic director Kent Weiser foresees his department spending twice what it did just three years ago on fuel costs for the same result. Adding a school outside of the traditional Kansas-Missouri region only will exacerbate that.

But as for the metropolitan program tapping its extensive resources to leave the smaller schools behind, it appears as if the Mavericks have a ways to go before turning Caniglia Field into a glamorous destination for recruits and opponents alike.

——— ★ ★ ★ ———

Nebraska-Omaha’s current financial situation does little to make Wollmering’s hairline feel stable.

“It would be kind of like adding Oklahoma to the Big 10,” the Truman AD said. “(Rolla and Baptist) said they just couldn’t compete with the facilities and those types of things. You saw it with the North Central. The haves moved on. The have nots ... ”

Wollmering is referring to Nebraska-Omaha’s former conference — the once mighty North Central. At the start of the decade, arguably the best Division II football was played in the NCC. But after four members bolted for Division I, the NCC ceased operations following last season.

Dave Williams, Missouri Western’s athletic director, graduated from Augustana (S.D.) College and was an assistant at North Dakota State — both former NCC members.

He said that scholarship disputes — not an arms race — led to the NCC’s breakup. The universities that went Division I didn’t want to be limited to Division II’s 36 scholarships. But it’s still a matter of the richer schools wanting more than the other members could or wanted to afford.

“You look at where the MIAA was five years ago with Missouri Rollas and SBU,” Emporia’s Weiser said. “There is always a risk of getting so big you lose sight of what’s important and what you are doing,” referring to his university’s desire to compete for championships without forgetting its role as an educational institution.

“When investments are so high, that’s easy to lose sight of,” Weiser added.

But Cannon, who spent five years on the losing end of that struggle with Rolla, doesn’t have a problem with the MIAA’s approach. He noted S&T gets its national exposure through its educational projects. Pittsburg or Northwest grab that spotlight for the university through their football teams.

“Every program exists for different reasons,” Cannon said. “If facilities and promoting the sports and wanting to compete at the national level, if that’s how your school wants to use athletics, I’m all for that.

“If somebody in some far away state has heard of Northwest Missouri State, it’s probably because they are nationally competitive in football. They are knocking out some advertising and promotions and publicity for the school.”

That’s clearly how MIAA’s top schools are using their athletic programs, and so the fundraising push goes on.

Jerry Hughes, Central Missouri’s AD for the past 25 years, remembers the good old days when the summer months brought with them plenty of down time to hit the links. Not anymore. As soon as baseball season ended May 29 for the Mules, who advanced to the Division II World Series, the athletic department shifted right into fundraising.

By next season, Hughes hopes to complete a $2 million renovation of the Mules’ locker, weight and training rooms. He also envisions new scoreboards for a number of programs in the near future, which means continually tapping into the university’s alumni base of 80,000, overseeing athletic auctions, etc.

“It never ends,” Hughes said. “You never get any breaks.”

The relentless process isn’t glamorous so the end result can be.

Sports reporter R.J. Cooper can reached at rjcooper@npgco.com