Conference Realignment: Closing the book...

Well it was one hell of an interesting week.

There have been all sorts of rumors and angles, but in the end it wasn't really that close, OU over played their hand and UT wasn't going to budge and they couldn't care less.

I said numerous times that I was ambivalent.

If Scott could pull it off then great! If not We still moved the needle with the TV deal he pulled together. That TV deal won't stay number one forever but it certainly set the bar high.

So lets look at it briefly and then move on.

Scott says it really wasn't that close...

"It wasn't nearly as close as the media painted it out to be," said Scott. "If you paid attention to where the media reports where coming from that it was imminent, it was all out of Texas."

[...]

"Oklahoma wanted us to do that [go to 14 teams] so we looked at it, but 14 never really made sense to us. A 16 team conference could have been a blockbuster with Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State."

Listen to the whole interview here...

I agree with Scott's take that most of the noise was coming from Texas. DFWTrojan, and others, nailed it in saying that Chip Brown was basically a UT mouth piece in pushing UT's agenda. Not really being familiar with Brown's work I really didn't know...props to DFW for pointing that out.

I have no problem with UT pushing the LHN as their revenue stream, but that doesn't fit with the Pac-12 model so its best for them to stay just where they are.

The Houston Chronicle's Richard Justice offers up a great take with his interview with Paul Finebaum earlier today.

With the Big-12 now announcing that ALL schools will share their TV revenues (tier 1 and tier 2) for the next six years (LHN is tier 3 and UT keeps all that money) they basically went with the Big-10 and Pac-12 model in keeping everyone in place. All 9 schools agree to stay with the Big-12.

That pretty much shuts the door on this for a while...unless of course some conference actually goes to 16 teams.

Then all bets are off...