Texas Longhorns Reaching 20-Year, $300 Million Deal with ESPN is Bad News

The Arizona Daily Star is reporting that the University of Texas has come to a 20-year, $300 million agreement with ESPN for a television network that will broadcast Longhorn athletic events and other content.

A press conference to officially announce the deal is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

The deal includes Texas’ licensing and marketing partner IMG, with a high majority of the profits directed back to the university.

The Austin-Statesman American newspaper says that the network contract will not take the place of current deals between the Big 12 and ESPN-ABC and Fox.

University of Texas President William Powers said, “We want to define what it means to be 'the' public university. The challenge is to create new sources of revenue to support our mission."

From a generic fan’s standpoint, I am not crazy when an individual college or university establishes such a contract. With this type of arrangement in place, television schedules aren’t always set up by which games are best or most important for conference races or national rankings, but based on who has the deal.

Also, the excessive exposure that is created by such a contract will no doubt impact recruiting. In some ways, this helps the institution, in this case Texas, gain an unequal benefit in attracting high school and junior college recruits. While creating a partial and biased recruiting advantage is not the likely intent of ESPN, that will be the probable result.

Along with the extreme coverage will be the incredible influx of finances for the university and athletic department. Clint Shields, in Fiscal Notes – March 2009 reports, “The University of Texas at Austin’s fiscal 2009 athletic budget, for example, tops $125 million, making it one of the largest athletic budgets in the nation.”

According to a report in the Birmingham Business Journal in June 2009, the Longhorns rank No. 1 in football revenue and overall revenue based on 2007-08 numbers. Texas generated $72.95 million in football revenue and $120.28 million overall.

If you are a Longhorn fan, you are lovin’ this. Your team gets more money to spend on making your teams even better. You get to see more of UT, more of the time…couldn’t be a sweeter deal.

I am not opposed to individuals or organizations benefiting from their success. I just don’t think it is in the best interest of college sports for a network like ESPN to be promoting a particular institution.