re: Thank You Mike Slive... The Texas Trainwreck.

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TSipper

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die please.

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That is quite the poignant reality right there, and perhaps the most damning of all testimonies against UT Athletics. Something most of us overlooked - but something that tells the whole story on Texas in a nutshell.

People need to be reminded of it more often.

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Yup. After Arky left, there were always only two Southwest Conference schools - Texas and A&M - that were assured of finding good landing spots. The SWC was DEAD. It DIED. DEAD. AS. A. DOORNAIL. The Big Eight was not dead, and it was not about to die. It was merely one of several destinations that Texas and A&M could have arrived at, along with the PAC, SEC, B1G, etc. But there was no "merger" of the Big Eight and the SWC...all eight of the Big 8 teams remained, whereas half of the old SWC was flat GONE and it took a lot of political maneuvering for Baylor to even survive. That was an expansion by the Big 8, not a merger, plain and simple.

Texas, though, acted not just like it was a merger, but as if they had completed a hostile takeover of the Big 8, from day one. Former Mizzou hoops coach Norm Stewart put it best: "It was like inviting someone over to your house for dinner and next thing you know they are rearranging all of your furniture."

The irony is that Texas benefitted more than anyone from the formation of the Big 12. Texas football was in a TERRIBLE spiral of mediocrity when the Big 12 formed. I think the season before they had gone like 4-7 or 5-6. A&M was the juggernaut. It was only when Texas got to compete on big national stages against teams like Nebraska and Colorado, when they got to compete with Oklahoma for division titles, that they got enough national publicity to rebuild themselves into a major national contender. Ingrates.

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Don't forget KState, kU, TCU, and WVU

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I did forget them. And so did the rest of the world.

That's the whole point.

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It’s a tier-3 rights station that shows a lot of basketball, baseball and women’s sports. That’s a single school specific partnership with ESPN is what makes it interesting, but it’s not anything more than that.

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The LHN is more than a place for Texas to dump non-revenue sports. It currently shows three football games a year. Not only is that a significant part of the season, but those games are the big selling point when cable companies pick up the network. If it was just minor sports no one would carry it.

Texas has sacrificed a lot for the LHN for brand and exposure reasons as well. It is hard to downplay its significance.

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At this point, we as fans know that all games of importantance are on ABC/ESPN/FOX and never on a tier-3 network like the LHN/BTN/SEC network.

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Actually that is not the case. Both the B1G and the PAC Network have had what would normally be Tier 2 games. The SEC Network is going also have Tier 2 games. Heck, the LHN had the Ole Miss game that would have at least made ESPN2.

These networks are now getting bigger games to force cable providers to pick them up. It is part of the money grab.

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Same thing will be true for any conference centric TV network

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I think the SEC Network will have pretty good ratings during say baseball season.

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Without the LHN, our desire to stay in the Big 12 becomes almost zero. The next round of conference expansion could see the death of the LHN and at that point, you could see Tech/Texas/OU/Ok State going to the Pac-12.

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Funny thing about that: The LHN deal is longer than the Big 12 GOR.

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Again, nobody watches the BTN unless your school is on.

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I watched several games on BTN and Pac12Net this year and I did not go to a school in either conference.

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Using Norm as a standard kind of takes your point away. He was a snake oil salesman also.

I always thought he and Roy did more harm to their overall programs than good

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Laughable comment is laughable. Thanks for the chuckle.

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It was reported last week that Missouri was discussing that potential of a move to the Big Ten.” At this point, war has started. Missouri is actively looking to leave the Big 12. The problem with this is that Nebraska is looking around and not finding a soft landing spot. So, instead of just sitting back to see if the Big 10 would take Mizzou or not, Nebraska goes on the offensive. Tom Osborne and the Nebraska administration and boosters make joining the Big 10 a singular mission and when Mizzou falters around the idea of paying both signage fee replacement (Mizzou was going to be on the hook for replacing all of the Big 10 paraphenalia at member institutions) and having to take a smaller stake of the Big 10 TV pot the first two seasons. Nebraska didn’t blink at this and with the Fox deal for the Big 10 title game (24mill per year) basically paying for the 12th school, taking a program with the history of Nebraska football over the Missouri TV markets became easy to do. Nebraska leaves the conference 8 months before the LHN is announced. In the Summer of 2010, the Big 12 south schools are actively speaking with Larry Scott and the Pac-10 about migrating over and forming the Pac 16. With the Pac 10 renegotiating their entire TV package and wanting to create regional sports stations for their Tier-3 coverage, adding the Texas markets and a program the caliber of OU is incredibly enticing. But A&M has second thoughts due to stated concerns about travel but more importantly, about the possibility of going to the SEC. The is the first time since the early-90s that the SEC is back on the menu for A&M and they are not going to go to the Pac-10 when the possibility of the SEC exists. The Pac-10 move is further complicated by the fact that the Pac-10 has no desire to take Baylor, a religious private school in a sea of Left Coast agnosticism. So, the Pac-10 gets aggressive and takes Colorado as a way of forcing the hand of the Big 12 south. But with A&M already not wanting to go and a desire to not leave Baylor behind, the transition falls apart and the Pac-10 takes Utah to get to 12.

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Missouri's governor expressing interest in the Big Ten didn't ultimately make Nebraska leave. What made the decision for Nebraska was finding out that Bill Powers had been talking to Larry Scott about taking six schools to the Pac, and Powers subsequent refusal to commit Texas to the Big XII when challenged at the president's meeting a couple of weeks before Nebraska made the move.

There were two reasons the Pac-10 move did not happen:

(1) Bill Powers assumed that he had the authority to speak for the other five schools, to the point of telling Loftin, early in the year, not to worry about the realignment talk, because UT would ensure that A&M was taken care of. That patronizing attitude poisoned the well, with Loftin and the regents. Knowing that the SEC was an alternative meant that A&M was never going to be coerced into joining the Pac-10 as UT's junior partner.

(2) Powers and UT assumed that the Pac-10 would ultimately cave in at the last minute and allow UT to have it's own network. This proved to be a mistaken assumption. Colorado being offered a stand alone invite shows you have far down the path Powers and Scott were when this fell apart. The Pac 10 would never have invited Colorado if they had thought that they would end up with Colorado and Utah, rather than Colorado, UT, OU, OSU, Tech and A&M.

A&M was only persuaded not to pursue the SEC move in 2010 by assurances from Beebe as to what the TV and revenue landscape would look like--and one of the key elements, from A&M's standpoint, was UT's planned network. Bill Byrne, who was no fan of the SEC move, was assured that UT's network would only get one out of conference game per year, just like what has been the case in the SEC for many years. When Beebe and UT welched on that, Byrne, SEC-hater though he was, was livid enough to consider the SEC move (the decision was made above his paygrade, but his opposition softened tremendously once he felt that he had been lied to).

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Scrooster has really grown on me.

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What? That senile old geezer?

Yeah, I guess he's okay.


To Scrooster!

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The Zou has all the elements to be a powerful athletic program except the abundance of local high school talent. I don't think that will be a problem. Ruffians have good partners who UNDERSTAND the value of promoting Mizzou's brand.

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Let's go give these t-sips a Missouri Boat Ride.