Eye opening.
http://www.12thmanfoundation.com/mem...d-article.aspx
Movers and Shakers (Part 1 of 2)
In a wide-ranging Q&A session, R. Bowen Loftin divulges how Texas A&M arrived at its 100-year decision to move to the SEC
Editor’s note: Texas A&M University president R. Bowen Loftin sat down with 12th Man Magazine’s Homer Jacobs and Rusty Burson for an exclusive interview concerning A&M’s exit from the Big 12 and move to the Southeastern Conference:
Q: In the summer of 2010, there was plenty of conference realignment talk. What brought everything back up in 2011?
Loftin: Let me take you back to June of 2009. I was interim president and within a few days of that time, I attended my first Big 12 board meeting in Dallas. Even though the presidents who were there were obviously civil and got along pretty well, it was clear there was some degree of difficulty within the conference then in terms of relationships. I call it the haves and have-nots. It was very clear which schools had money, and we were sort of in the middle of that pack.
That’s where I first began to have some degree (of concern) on where the stance of the conference was. In the fall of 2009, we began to hear rumors about UT meeting and talking with the Pac-10. I was actually in Austin in December 2009 meeting with (University of Texas president) Bill Powers. At that point, I had asked everyone but him to leave the room so we could talk privately. I asked him if there was any conversation between him and the Pac-10 and his answer basically was, “I can’t talk about that.” The next month, he was in College Station, and we met in my office. I had the same question, and he gave me the same answer.
Go forward to the April (2010) timeframe…
I got a call from (Pac-10 commissioner) Larry Scott indicating he wanted to come see me. Scott shows up here, and we have a meeting. Basically they had been working for months, and he had schedules of not just football but, basketball, soccer and baseball, and they had been working hard on this thing. He did a presentation for us on here’s how we are going to do this. I obviously began discussing this privately with the Board of Regents, and the basic direction I got from them was, “Look, we’ll probably get an offer from the Pac-10 to go join them along with five other schools in the Big 12.” The chairman of the board said to me, “One option is no option. You better figure out what things A&M could do besides follow Texas and other schools to the Pac-10.”
Q: Were you dumbfounded by this development?
Loftin: No, I had heard rumors. Powers wasn’t talking to me; I heard rumors and was not completely surprised. After I had this conversation with the board, I made a phone call to (SEC commissioner) Mike Slive and said, “Mike we need to talk.” Ultimately, he came here to see me, and we had a discussion about the SEC as a possible home for Texas A&M. That was late April to early May of 2010. We had a lot of other discussions going on by the time, and we had a clear sense the Pac-10 wanted to do this.
Q: Did you feel uncomfortable that Texas was trying to persuade A&M to tag along with it to the Pac-10?
Loftin: Clearly we weren’t driving the train. We were passengers at best, and that was a concern. You don’t want to have your destiny usurped by someone else. We slowed things down, and there was political pressure to not allow the Big 12 to dissolve. As we got to the early June meeting of the Big 12 board in Kansas City, (Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe) had all the presidents, chancellors and all the athletic directors in one room. There were 24 of us there, plus Beebe and a few of his staff. Beebe polled the board and said he wanted us to declare whether we were committed to the Big 12 or not.
Three schools didn’t commit at that point, and the answer I gave was different from everyone else’s. I said that A&M was committed to the Big 12 as it is today. I chose those words very carefully. Since then, I have been accused of being a liar because I committed based on a 12-team conference as it was structured in June 2010. I said my words very carefully because I was not going to set myself into a situation where the conference was radically changed and we would be committed to being in a conference we didn’t really want to be a part of.
Q: What was the tipping point to possibly leaving the Big 12?
Loftin: We went to a meeting, and it was very clear there were three schools that were looking at leaving. There were six other schools that were looking at going to the Pac-10. Over that next week, we felt the pressure building heavily. Then Larry Scott took a private jet and made his rounds to all the six schools. He went to Oklahoma first, then Oklahoma State, and then he came to see me, then to Texas Tech, and was headed back down to Texas. We were at a Sunday meeting at Easterwood Airport. Scott had a draft letter of invitation for me to see. In the conversation I said, “You are aware now that UT wants to retain its local rights to be able to have (its) own network.” Larry said that couldn’t happen. He said he made it clear to President Powers that would not be allowed. I said, “Well, I think there is a misunderstanding here.” I think that was a third factor in the following days for UT not to proceed. I wasn’t there; I can’t prove it, but I think they had a strong conversation.
Q: You pointed that out to Commissioner Scott?
Loftin: Yes. I said, “Larry, you told us what the rules are and we understand that. I am hearing from UT a different story right now, and you better explore that with them.” They did, so I think that was part of the equation. We slowed things down, there’s a little (political) pressure, and then this (Longhorn) network thing came about. Unfortunately, Bill (Byrne) was in Idaho that weekend, and the next day we couldn’t communicate well. I finally reached Beebe, and he had five secured letters from other schools that would guarantee a $20 million payout for us, UT and OU if we stayed in the Big 12. That’s where we were that Monday afternoon, and then UT announced they were not going to leave and it all kind of fell apart then.
Q: Did you always feel the SEC was a viable option for A&M?
Loftin: In June of 2010 after we made the decision to stay in the Big 12, the first conversation I had was with Mike Slive. We were talking about maybe going to the SEC at that point, so I owed that to Mike and said, “Mike, this is the direction we are going right now, and I want you to know that I really appreciate the interaction we have had over the last several months.” We talked a couple times in the fall of 2010, then I ran into him physically at the Cotton Bowl and we just had a social conversation. I always had a sense that the doorway there was not closed to us and we could certainly come back and talk about this in the future.
Q: Let’s fast forward. When the SEC presidents and chancellors met on a Sunday in August of 2011, no formal vote was taken to invite A&M into the conference. Yet the media perception was that A&M had been rejected. How frustrating was that?
Loftin: There were actually three meetings among the SEC (presidents), two face-to-face and one telephonically. That first meeting was informational, trying to get everyone on the same page. For the previous year, Mike Slive had put together a nice presentation on A&M in comparison to SEC schools. He showed in snap shots how Texas A&M looked in comparison to the SEC, such as our enrollment, budget for athletics, academic standards, and other things. He had 20 or 30 slides he put together from the summer of 2010. They had some new members on their board and chancellors, so he was educating them about that.
Again, I didn’t expect a decision to be made in that August meeting. It could have happened, but I didn’t necessarily expect it to. That was the frenzy the media had because they expected a decision, and that didn’t happen. There were some issues they raised with us. We met with Mike in New Orleans prior to that meeting with our Board of Regents and talked about some issues. After that, their lawyer was looking at the Big 12 bylaws and was as confused as we were about them. There were some things we had to look through from a legal perspective to give them some comfort for this to all take place. So, that’s where we were for our first meeting with SEC leadership.
Then fast forward, we sort of went through all of those things and resolved them. We had a sense that we could withdraw appropriately from the Big 12 in the bylaws, so I sent my letter in to the commissioner, saying we wanted to withdraw effective June 30, 2012 if we had a membership with another conference. This was identical to how Nebraska did it the year before. Beebe called me along with the chairman of their board and said, “We want you cleanly out, so let’s get this thing resolved. What do you need?” Basically they wrote a letter, which Beebe signed and that their lawyer prepared saying that we were free to go by following the process done by Nebraska that previous year.
Q: At that point, did you think everything was clear to move to the SEC?
Loftin: Yeah, we thought this was everything we needed to go forward. A second meeting among the SEC (presidents) was scheduled based on that. The Friday before that meeting is when (OU president) David Boren made his public comments about Oklahoma’s circumstances. Then the day of the meeting on Tuesday is when (Baylor president) Ken Starr made his phone calls and that threw things in disarray again. The (SEC) met and formally invited us, but they did so with the caveat of working through these legal issues that had been primarily raised by Starr, so that’s where we were after meeting two.
We worked some of these issues out with them over the next several days, and there was a third telephonic meeting that had occurred that Sunday before the Monday when we had our big event here. At that point, we had the statement from Larry Scott in the Pac-12 that they were not going to be inviting OU and OSU to join them, and that seemed to put that to bed. All we wanted to know at that point was if the Big 12 was going to survive or not. If they survive, then there is no harm done; if they fall apart, then there is nobody left to deal with. Either way this goes, we will give them a membership unconditionally in response to their request for membership. At that point, we were ready for it to happen so the (SEC) board then met that Sunday by telephone and unanimously voted us in with no conditions at all. We knew then we could celebrate Monday night (Sept. 26), and that was the end of that story.
Q: What were your conversations like with Baylor president Ken Starr?
Loftin: We only had one direct conversation about it. I pointed out to Mr. Starr that what he was doing was more destabilizing than what we were doing because he was trying to coerce a member to stay in the conference. A conference is something you are in because you want to be in it and not because you are forced to be in it. That’s my theory anyway. I likened it to the Berlin Wall in that conversation by saying, “You want to build a wall around people that want to get out, and that didn’t work out too well.” That was my comment to him. I wouldn’t say it was a shouting match, but it was a tense conversation. Since that time, I’ve been in collective telephonic conversations with him but not individually yet.
