BYU Big 12: TV Deal Will Prove Contentious If Cougars Crash BCS

That revving of engines you're hearing? It's just the sound of conference realignment starting up again, this time with word spreading that BYU will be the first and most prominent of several schools offered a stake in the Big 12.

Whether the Cougars accept, and whether they would actually stick in the fledgling conference, is a different monster to grapple with entirely.

The biggest obstacle standing between BYU and a place in the Big 12 is (you guessed it!) television. BYU already has its own TV network in conjunction with ESPN—BYUtv—and isn't likely to give that up without a fight.

And if there's any conference that knows the peril of letting a school run the show with its own TV network, it's the Big 12. The league wouldn't likely be in the precarious position in which it finds itself today had now-former commissioner Dan Beebe acted quickly and decisively to put together a TV network for the Big 12 and disallowed Texas from forming its much-debated Longhorn Network.

As it turns out, schools that don't have their own TV deals (read: endless and unchecked flows of cash) don't take kindly to those who do and, more importantly, those who would withhold all the profits for themselves. Such exceptionalism necessarily throws an already tilted playing field out of whack, placing one "have" on a pedestal above a league of "have-nots".

So, it's possible that even the likes of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Baylor would advise interim commissioner Chuck Neinas to proceed with caution in the courtship of BYU. The Cougars' athletic department isn't quite as strong as those at the top of the Big 12, though giving BYU access to the resources and markets of a BCS conference could very well turn the program into a sporting superpower.

As far as TV deal allowances are concerned, BYUtv isn't strictly a money-making venture, at least not to the extent that the Longhorn Network is. BYUtv is intended as a national media outlet for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with BYU sports serving just one aspect of the network's programming, albeit an important one.

For the Big 12, though, the need for new schools now may outweigh the risk of further fractionalization in the future. In BYU, the conference's Midwestern members gain not only access to the Rocky Mountain media market, but also exposure among millions of LDS followers across the country.

That being said, until everyone else in the Big 12 gets a hefty green handshake out of all this, any school with its own TV network will garner some measure of disdain from its peers, potentially to disastrous effect within the league.

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