Another reason why Mizzou and Nebraska should leave
http://www.huskerextra.com/articles/...5040840910.txt
Steven M. Sipple: Osborne still wants Big 12 site rotation
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Things I know and things I think I know:
* In exactly a month, the Big 12 Conference board of directors will vote whether to keep the league’s football title game at Cowboys Stadium through 2013, or continue to rotate the site.
Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, in a radio interview last week on the Husker Sports Network, sounded inclined toward keeping the game in suburban Dallas.
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“Look, the fact of the matter is, we have the facility in this region of the country that is the best in the world right now, that is also in a recruiting hotbed for all of our programs,” he said. “So, I think our members so far feel like, why would we move away from such a tremendous facility?”
Um, not quite all members feel that way.
Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne told me Monday that Big 12 athletic directors voted on the issue in March at the request of Beebe, perhaps as a way for the commissioner to test the waters.
“The vote, as I recall, was 11-1 to return to Texas and to give them a three-year contract,” Osborne said.
You probably can guess the lone dissenter.
“I expressed some reservations,” Osborne said. “Being at Cowboys Stadium was a novelty for fans, and certainly it was a good crowd this year, but that novelty won’t be there every year. And for schools from the North Division to have to go down there every year, it doesn’t seem quite right to me. I thought it should be rotated between a northern venue and a southern venue.”
The Big 12 board of directors, of which Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman is a member, will vote on championship sites for football, baseball and basketball June 3-4 in Kansas City, Mo. The board has been opposed to anchoring sites.
Of course, that was before JerryWorld opened. The stadium is comfortable and alluring in its distinctly wealthy way. The 2009 championship game earned more money ($10 million-plus) than any title game in Big 12 history.
Under a prior contract, the game returns to Cowboys Stadium in 2010. As for future games, well, big money and creature comfort can be difficult to argue against, which is partly why Osborne’s hard-line stance is intriguing, but not all that surprising.
In past interviews, he has expressed concern that the Big 12 has tilted decidedly south — which is probably part of the reason he keeps an open mind about Nebraska joining the Big Ten.
* By the way, there’s not much news on the Big Ten/Pac-10 expansion front. Rampant speculation (it’s fun, isn’t it?) just makes it feel like there’s news.
“Really, until these conferences make up their minds what they want to do, and start making offers one way or another, it’s hard to assess the landscape,” Osborne said. “You just don’t know for sure what they’re thinking. And, obviously, they have not called us, and they have not informed us what they’re thinking.
“It’s not that we’re just sitting here not doing anything,” he added. “But you can’t all of a sudden begin to make a lot of phone calls to people when you don’t even know what the parameters are.”
And if the Big Ten made an overture to Nebraska?
“We have to listen to anything,” he said, reiterating his past comments. “Because, if it looks like the Big 12 is going to take a real big hit, and lose two or three or four teams, then you’d have to take a look. If, on the other hand, it looks like the Big 12 is staying intact, then that’s another issue.
“There’s no way anybody at this point can know.”
* Not sure I want to know the range of fluids Tom Osborne Field absorbed Sunday as 8,000 runners finished the Lincoln Marathon at the 50-yard line.
I’m all for the marathon fun continuing in Memorial Stadium in the future. But hey, it’s not my field.
“We will have to sit down and evaluate how it went this year,” Osborne said. “Were there any glitches? Did it put an undue burden on our staff?
“The main thing is, we just don’t want the general public to feel the stadium is something that’s going to be open to a large number of events. We will do that on occasion. But we don't want to make a habit of it.”
* So, Husker baseball coach Mike Anderson gets at least another year. I thought it would be a close call. I thought wrong. Osborne clearly believes in Anderson, even though my e-mail basket tells me many fans are hot over the program’s startling decline.
Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.