re: Chips are down: Why is TTU dug in when they are clearly on the wrong side of history?

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Dodds figured that Texas would have to pay out of its own pockets to pull it off. The Big Ten Network’s launch in 2006 ushered in the era of conference networks, but nobody had tried one for a single school. Even Dodds was skeptical Texas could produce enough content for a 24-hour channel, which is why he called Texas A&M athletic director Bill Byrne early in the exploratory process — well before anyone, including Dodds, knew it would drive substantial revenue for the schools — to see if the Aggies were interested in partnering on it.

“There was a discussion about that, but it never got legs,” former Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin said. “I never got the sense that we could cut a deal that would make sense for Texas A&M to be somehow connected to their network.”

Loftin had a trusted television industry contact later explore the idea of the Aggies launching a network of their own, “but the analyses I saw did not make sense for us,” he said.

A Big 12 network could have pre-empted the idea of schools launching their own, but some league members were reluctant to go that route. Kevin Weiberg, the Big 12 commissioner from 1998 to 2007, tried to talk league members into it before he left to take a vice president role at Big Ten Network.

“In order to do a conference network, you have to have a very broad assignment of media rights,” Weiberg told The Oklahoman in 2014, referencing the amount of content that must be surrendered and coordinated to fill out a cable channel. “In the Big 12, there wasn’t a willingness to participate in the common conference approach.”

Weiberg told ESPN in 2016 that Texas had opposed a conference network a decade prior but other members were “just as reluctant.”

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Besides the failure longhorn network among other things

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Texas orchestrated all on their own the potential move to the PAC

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