I never managed to post about all the conference re-alignment. In summary, I am pleased with where UT landed. The money pie is bigger, there are fewer slices, and UT gets a disproportionate share. So it makes sense economically. As far as competition goes, sure we lose CU and NU, but we play one more conference game every year, so that I believe is a net improvement to our schedule. While I love CCGs, it was never fair (think 2001) that we had to play one when the Pac-10, Big 10 and others did not. You think Ohio State or USC might have missed a chance to play in a National Championship had they been forced to play a CCG? So I like it from a competitive standpoint, too. And there is more to life than football, and CU and NU offered nothing in the other major sports. So, yeah, I like where we landed.
I think Tom Osborne is a little piece of shit. He is just a whiney little bitch who is still mad that UT, during the formation of the Big 12, pushed through the banning of partial qualifiers and added the CCG. To make matters worse, we knocked them out of the National Championship game in 1996 when we beat them….in the CCG! Then we went on to go 6-0 against them in the regular season and 2-1 in CCGs. See ya, Tom.
I also think there is a little bit of fuzzy math that went on. The “new” TV money we got was coming to us anyway as we were at the end of our TV contracts. So the pie was going to grow regardless, we just now have fewer slices.
And while I agree that conference re-alignment will continue from now until we die, I think that UT’s fellow Big 12ers have grown to realize that, in the words of Jack from LOST, “we can either live together or we can die alone.” Missou, in particular, after digesting its humble pie, isn’t about to start sneaking around and flirting with other conferences. And OU (all along) and A&M (eventually) realized that they are better off with UT than on their own (Exhibit A: Arkansas). So I think we are on more stable ground than we were, say, a year ago.
