Big 12 May Be Salvaged After All
The New York Times is reporting by way of Orangebloods.com that right now Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe is making a pitch to the 10 remaining teams in the conference to stay on board — and that it appears Texas will be doing just that.
This, of course, completely negates everything I mentioned last Friday, proving that news broken on Friday afternoons never actually counts. It’s a wonder what a weekend will do.
Of course, the whole issue is over money, and Beebe is all about pleasing the biggest moneymaking football team in the nation, so a new TV deal is being worked up right now that would roughly double the revenue each of the remaining schools currently gets. New rec centers for all!
So everyone seems to be a winner here, especially UT, which will get to make its own TV network. Will the other campuses around the Big 12 be mad about this? Well Kansas, K-State, Baylor, and Iowa State certainly won’t. They just got pardoned from athletic death row if this deal goes through. The schools that were going to go out west with us aren’t probably any worse than they began this whole thing, but they are still under the shadow of the burnt-orange colossus.
The two schools that might be a little peeved right now? Colorado and Nebraska. Sure, they broke away from the pack and found new homes, but their going-away presents were to pay over $20 million in buyouts combined (item 3 under “The Beebe Plan”). The 10 schools sitting tight just pocketed about $2 mil each because of the defection, and all they did was restructure their TV deals to pay them more money.
Of course, this could all end up in the trash by tomorrow morning, just like some 72 hours ago everyone was getting into beach season bodies to prepare themselves for the sunny confines of California in October. Don’t worry about it people, go back to eating Kreuz barbeque and drinking Shiners.
Share this article
1 Comment