(08-14-2016 01:39 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote: If the Big12 thinks they can play dress up until 2024 then they are already lost.
2024 is an enternity away.
I'm now starting to buy the conference room theories.
The world moves much faster than it did in the 60s--and the 90s.
IMO here are the events leading to this moment.
1. SMU and the OU / UGA decision kill the SWC. Texas scrambles to reassemble their fiefdom by dissing the PAC and pushing the Big 12 idea.
2. Nebraska says screw this Texas crap and bails for more money and a different overlord(s).
3. Colorado with major internal issues take "the first train for the coast, only without the Father, Son and Holy Ghost" and get their sorry butts stuck in the doldrums of the PAC.
4. A&M does what they've wanted for years and a spurned Mizzou jumps hitches the first ride that picks them up for some breakup revenge against the Big 10.
5. Texas threatens to go to the PAC at this point to extract a bribe not to do so from ESPN that is pissing their pants to keep from losing their lasso on Bevo. ESPN will forever regret the LHN.
6. Now that networks have created a great and burgeoning disparity in income, and now that the best realignment targets are safely locked either in the big time winning conferences (SEC & Big 10) or are safely squirreled away behind a GOR (ACC) Texas and Oklahoma find themselves adrift in an ocean of football flotsam clinging to the only thing that still floats, their reputations.
7. So Texas concocts this I'll make you pay pro rata strategy to extract a sum that the networks are willing to pay to keep them from screwing up the culmination of realignment by adding more whiny wannabes to the predetermined number of the new upper tier. That figure was a 19% bump over where they are. UT does the math vs pro rata but still wants their fiefdom as it has been for decades.
8. Bevo calls Trammel and says float this offer. The money is the same as the 19% or the pro rata, but it lets Texas keep their own division of basically Texas schools. It allows Oklahoma to keep OSU and KState is salvaged by Kansas and Iowa State stays P5. They think it's great and surely ESPN will jump at this.
Now we have to wonder how totally hacked ESPN may be for getting publicly yanked around this way.
The positives for ESPN I've listed. But, not even ESPN is going to force the SEC to do something it might indeed want to resist.
The question will become if the answer is "No" what will Texas try to do now? They have a history of trying to knock over the party table when they don't get their way.
ESPN might just say to Texas, "FOX YOU BEVO!", wiggle out of the LHN, and let them head North along the Chisolm Trail to the slaughterhouse in Chicago. After all that is their history.
Oklahoma would be a lot easier to appease and to live with. And ESPN might double their efforts to land them if they cut Texas loose. We'll see.
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