Big 12 Coaches Are Right To Question the Fairness of the Longhorn Network

Last week, there was one big elephant in the room at the Big 12 football media days in Dallas, and for once, it wasn’t Mark Mangino.

The taboo subject which the coaches tried their best to avoid and tip toe around without letting a juicy sound bite slip was the soon-to-be-launched Longhorn Network, an ESPN-run cable channel that will be solely dedicated to University of Texas athletics.

In a time when the conference is supposed to be focused on healing and coming back together after losing both Colorado and Nebraska this offseason, it appears that the Longhorn Network is causing a silent storm out in the Midwest.

While we’re all well aware that Texas is the richest program in the Big 12 and one of college football’s mega revenue producers, you have to wonder, in this day and age when there is such a microscope on recruiting practices, why one school is allowed to have such an obvious advantage over the competition.

Silly me, I was under this strange assumption that college football was still an amateur sport in which all participants were governed by the same rules.

My mistake.

Remember back when that whole college football expansion mess hit the fan last summer, and we we’re all left wondering which conference would be the one left standing as the ultimate victor when it was all said and done? 

Well, I know Larry Scott may disagree with me, but the Pac-12 wasn’t the true champion of last summer’s expansion fiasco.

No sir.

Forget about collective conferences, the undisputed winner was none other than Texas, the school that held the college football world hostage and then made off like a bandit with the biggest reward.

These days, I guess $15 million a year is the going rate for a 5-7 football team because that’s what the Longhorn athletic department is set to earn over the next 20 years, courtesy of the deal Texas signed with ESPN and IMG College.

That’s right, Texas will have the ultimate promotional platform to push its brand nationwide, and the kicker is that the Longhorns will be getting paid handsomely for a privilege that no other school in America has.

Sounds fair and reasonable, right?

Well, something tells me that every Big 12 coach not named Mack Brown has taken umbrage with the new network.

At the media days, Texas A&M coach Mike Sherman simply skipped right over a question about the LHN, and other coaches took the high road approach as well, refusing to really divulge their true feelings on the matter.

Because when you get right down to the bottom of the envelope, any college football coach is just as much a recruiter as he is a coach.

They’re all just much higher paid versions of that crazy lady from Shippensburg University who showed up at your high school’s college fair and bombarded you with 800 brochures, begging you to come take a visit to see the campus.

In the world of major college football, recruiting is everything.

That’s why there are thousands of different recruiting codes, mandates and guidelines that the NCAA forces each school to follow.

That’s why you’ve got reports and rumors of high-profile players like Cam Newton and Patrick Peterson asking for large sums of money from schools.

That’s why allowing one program to hop in bed with the country’s leading sports broadcasting giant and develop a national cable television channel does appear to be a tad bit unjust and unbalanced.

Mike Sherman and his Big 12 coaching brethren can take solace in the fact that today, the Big 12 athletic directors unanimously voted to shoot down the idea of broadcasting high school football games on the LHN this year (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/college/texas/7679285.html).

But, it’s the fact that it was even a thought in the first place which is really scary.

Many coaches at major schools use the recruiting pitch: if you come play for my school, you can play on TV in front of the entire country. However, if the NCAA chooses to lift the one-year ban of high school content on LHN some time in the future, that’s something Texas won’t even have to worry about.

They can just tell their recruits, "Hey, you commit to us, we’ll put your high school games on our channel."

And once that happens, that’s when things will get really sticky and shady.

Back in 2006, the NCAA ruled that Steve Spurrier’s wife Jerri had committed a Level II recruiting infraction for sending South Carolina commits handwritten welcome notes. But I guess a television channel is a bit more informal for their tastes, so that’s fine.

Ethically, we know that there are obviously so many things wrong with the idea of the Longhorn Network, but we have to remember that we now live in a college football culture where money is paramount.

The line between fair and unfair and the line between right and wrong doesn’t exist anymore.  

Right now, the only line that matters in college football is the bottom line of an income statement.

Texas has made sure that no other athletic program in America will have as big of a bottom line, but what will be the true cost of the Longhorn Network? 

Will it inevitably tear the already frayed fabric of the Big 12 to pieces?

Will it set a new dangerous trend?

Will the rest of college football’s power programs all start lining up for their own multi-million dollar deals?

That all remains to be seen, but one thing is very clear.

Over the next few years, the Longhorn Network is going to evoke a lot of angry feelings, which were summed up best by Texas coach Mack Brown during his press conference last week.

When asked what he thought of other Big 12 teams being disgruntled with his school’s television network, Brown responded, “If I didn’t have it, I’d be mad too.”