http://media.nebraska.statepaper.com...edbackIcon.gif <!-- end articleOptions --> The Big 12 Lives - But Still Has a Texas Problem

Commentary: A&M, TV deal UT happy - for now. It won't last.

by Samuel McKewon
June 14, 2010

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Wikipedia
It's Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and seven of these little guys.
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<!-- end storyImage1 --> With bluffs and threats and proverbially shaking fists, Texas tried to bully the Big 12 South into bending to its will and heading to the Pac-10. Or so it seemed.
Master! The Big 12! It’s alive!
It’ll be Texas A&M athletic director Bill Byrne who inadvertently helped save the league. His refusal to play the “UT says” game - and his keen understanding of just how awry “Pac-16” travel schedules could get - was the lone stumbling block in the plan of Texas President Bill Powers, a California-Berkeley graduate - to send Dust Bowl football on the last train for the coast.
That stumbling block bought some key people - whom ESPN says you’ll never know- enough time to cobble together a weird, long-term TV deal - that, as of this hour, has remained oddly secret - that satisfied UT enough to make the Horns’ final demands to the Pac-10 utterly unreasonable.
Long story short: The TV, BCS and NCAA people weren’t ready for interstellar war and the Congressional snooping that was sure to come with it. They pulled Texas back from the brink, intervened on the behalf of the hapless Dan Beebe and saved a lot of butts.
And Nebraska slipped out of one hot mess of a league just in time.
It’s going to take years to truly unravel what happened over the last several months.
Because Rivals.com seems to have funneled its coverage through the reporter with the chattiest source, you’ve primarily heard UT’s side of the story. And what a side of beef it is! Somehow, while Texas flirted with three different conferences - the Pac-10, the Big Ten and SEC - while stringing along its Big 12, and it remained a steadfast savior, the Boss Horn.
Garbage. Until Monday, the Longhorns appeared willing to drag a coalition of the half-willing to the Pac-10. It would have been, over time, a disaster. To repeat: Texas was courting its own demise trucking itself to a league that has been, and will continue to be, irrelevant to the East Coast unless USC’s on the tube.
The “savior” will now get to own and control its Longhorn Sports Network while Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri lick cowboy boots. They’ll be thankful, of course - what choice do they have? - but they’ll be hired hands on UT‘s ranch.
A&M survived a slew of Texas threats but stood firm, using a threat of its own: The SEC. The Aggies’ surely intended to make the leap. Their intent staved off the Pac-10’s power play.
If you wanted to know what scares Texas, the Aggies unloaded the kryptonite. If Texas is Sentenza il brutto, the SEC is Tuco il cattivo. If the A&M gave the keys of Texas high school football to the SEC and its greasy palms, UT could no longer so easily usher in its preferred prospects on Junior Day and pressure them into committing. You don’t want a guy like Nick Saban sniffing around the DFW Metroplex and Houston, selling kids on the best football conference in the nation (which it still is).
But A&M’s bluff had a lot more bite than UT’s threat to disavow College Station. An encroachment from the east by the SEC, coupled with an inevitable partnership with the West, would have put Texas in a kind of checkmate. Far from consolidating its power from Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, the two moves combined would have eroded what makes Texas…Texas.
Now, the Longhorns don’t turn in to the Roman Empire, don’t erode the traditional Pac-10 brand and maintain a Midwestern presence.
Minus Nebraska, of course.
The Big 12’s survival will cause some NU fans to glance back at a league that may dump its conference title game and create a round-robin scheduling format that would have allowed the Huskers to renew their Oklahoma rivalry.
Maybe they‘ll ask: If we could trade places with Missouri right this second - would we do it?
(And Mizzou says: Sure!)
But Nebraska should be thrilled with its choice.
The “Texas problem” is never going away. Not for the Big 12, not for Beebe - who will try to jump ship at the first sign of shore - and, perhaps worst of all, not for Texas, whose appetite is insatiable and antithetical, frankly, to good sense. The Horns’ reaction to the mere prospect of realignment was both childish and hypocritical, an impulse of jealousy and base greed. Think Jett Rink. Or Hud. The efficiency with which UT controlled and spun the story through the media is startling. Lone Star state politics is a cutthroat game in its own right.
And mark these words: Texas will test the open market again - with its Longhorns Sports Network firmly in place - and present itself to whichever conference is willing to bend its rules to fit UT under the umbrella.
Don’t forget this little nugget from the Denver Post, which quoted an exasperated Pac-10 negotiator: “At the 11th hour, after months of telling us they understand the TV rights, they're trying to pull a fast one on the verge of sealing the deal in the regents meeting. They want a better revenue sharing deal and their own network. Those were points of principle. (The Pac-10) wants to treat everyone fairly. It's been that way for months of discussions."
M-o-n-t-h-s of discussions. Texas can and will flirt. Long-term TV deal or not.
So Nebraska needs to walk away. No regrets.
And in a decade, you’ll see why. NU will be in a coffee shop talking research with its new friends. The Big 12 will be in another barroom brawl. Texas will be standing on a table, looking to dive into the scrum, a broken bottle in one hoof, a money clip in another.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch has an article out saying that the new Big 12 will have three tiered system for football payouts. First tier will be OU, UT, and A&M at 20+ million dollars a year. The second tier will be Ok. State and Texas Tech at 15-17 million a year. The last tier is everyone else at 14 million or less a year.

Missouri has to be led by some of the world's all time greatest ****ups to go from thinking they had a sure thing in the Big 10 to getting a train ran on them by the Big 12 South minus Baylor. Here is the article.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/spo...1?OpenDocument

Let me ask you this. What if this uneven revenue distribution system actually becomes a weapon rather than a curse? What if the Big 10, who by the way has been as equally ruthless in their methods to expand their conference, obtains Syracuse, threatens the stability of the Big East, and tries to force the issue with the Notre Dame?

Notre Dame, with its own negotiated NBC deal and unwillingness to have revenue it generates shared and distributed with institutions whose research it doesn't theologically agree with looks Beebe's and the Big XII's way. Beebe says, look, here you can keep your own contract, not feel pressured to participate in joint research projects you oppose, and get to feast on the Big XII North division, essentially becoming the Texas of the North.

Do you think a conference that boasts Texas and Notre Dame would be in trouble?

**** me.

If MU gets railroaded by Texas Tech and OSU in this...ugh, just unbelievable.

What a bunch of incompetent assholes we have in this program.

Meanwhile, I'm not exactly worried about Jim Delany's ability to negotiate a TV contract for the Big 10. The Big 10 also has four bowl games on New Year's Day.

Personally, I'm not that bent over it. We all know this expansion was led by football and TV revenues. What schools in the conference generate those for us? The Big XII South teams do, and its not even close. What state provides the recruiting ground for almost every conference member? Texas does. What state provides the most viewership? Texas does. And so, what do us poor little Texas bitches have to put up with to allow Texas to take the lion's share? Only a hair under what the SEC schools currently get. That's right, despite little gridiron history to speak of or titles to add, Texas, who we haven't even been partners with for more than 15 years has enabled us to be players in major college athletics. I mean, who else was looking out for us? AT ALL. You want a bigger share of the pie, here's what I would do: WIN. Win often and win big so it is at other's peril to overlook you as a key contributor or attractive target, and quit bitching about good fortune. You almost just doubled your previous high mark takes for a season.

Have we had an MU press conference yet with Deaton and Alden being led out in full gimp gear complete with ball gags by Bevo?

What a couple of ****ing epic morons.

OSU and TTU could have gone to the Pac-10. Mizzou has no choice here and so no bargaining power.

I really think The University of Texas are a bunch of pussies for being afraid to get their brains bashed in against the SEC.

Mizzou has no choice here because their administration is a pack of ****ing morons.

And let's be real here, Tech and OSU couldn't have gone off to the Pac-10 on their own. The Oklahoma legislature had been making noise for weeks now about not splitting the two state schools and the Pac-10's not extending an offer for Tech without UT coming along for the ride.

Nope, this was a punishment. MU overplayed its hand and UT is telling them to sit in a ****ing corner and like it.

Nicely done, dickheads. Nicely ****ing done.

What you are saying is only partly true. Under the old revenue sharing system, a school's payout was determined by TV appearances. In that system, Missouri was doing quite well and was earning more than Tech or A&M. If the St. Louis Post Dispatch is accurate, MU will earn less despite outperforming Tech and Ok. State in recent years.

I'd be fine if they came out in their suits as long as they got pummeled by rotten fruit and vegetables.

But, maybe that's part of the problem, we're content to do fine. As you stated, we don't yet know the details of how it works. For example, let's say Missouri (in the third tier) has an exceptional year, while the second tier schools have lesser years. The money that would have gone to them now goes to you, and although you may not be able to make more, you may make the maximum in your tier and they may make the floor of theirs, making the payout maybe even less than a million dollars difference. If you can sustain excellence, you can push for a better deal, not only because you have proven your worth to the league, but also because you have made yourself attractive to others. Even Self says they haven't "dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's yet, so we should wait to see how revenues are actually distributed.

We have to remember, its not just the schools, each stat'e board of regents also has their says. So even if they aren't Texas and OU, the BOR of those states made sure the leverage they had extended to all of its state schools. I would expect that if basketball were the dominant revenue generator, KU would have done the same for KSu at that state's BOR request.

Missouri's performance in this ordeal has been pathetic.

If you look at the last five years, their performance in football has bettered every team in the conference save OU and Texas. They've been even or slightly ahead of OSU.

As far as basketball goes, the resurgence under Anderson has been promising as well. Coupled with the fact that OU's program is in the toilet, I think it's safe to say that Missouri is the 3rd-5th best athletic program in conference if you just look at the two major sports.

Getting a third tier deal is pathetic, especially when your state holds the only two other major population centers outside of Texas in the entire conference.

:spock: