George W. Bush & The Longhorn Network: Austin's Miserable Failures

Their complaints are exactly what Disney paid for. There’s virtually no marketable programming for the LHN. The entire negotiating strategy with the distributors is to take games that would otherwise have been on TV (at least as pay per view options) and make them unavailable. When Texas fans get upset because they aren’t able to watch games that they should be able to watch, Disney and Texas tell them to “contact your Cable/Satellite provider today.” The whole idea is to make Texas fans mad, so that they’ll call distributors and demand the LHN. In it’s most basic terms, Texas has sold its fan base to the Disney Corporation to be used as negotiating fodder. (Other schools have certainly negotiated lucrative deals, but the object was to make available those games that would not otherwise be available and to do so on the best terms you can get. Texas is taking cash to withhold games that would have been available otherwise so that its fans will pay it and the Disney corporation more money.)

To their credit distributors have shrugged…so far. Texas-Rice simply wasn’t big enough and distributors have bet on basically no one bothering them until Texas plays Rice next year. But, the stakes changed on Friday.

First, Kansas agreed to play on the LHN and Beebe signed off on it. So, at a minimum, there will be another round of disgruntled Texas fans calling distributors later this year, and that group will likely be bigger than the Rice group. But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Also on Friday, Beebe called an emergency phone-conference between every school except Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma, where the message was that all of the other schools should call Texas and swear their allegiance. Beebe’s thinking was that If Texas stays, then maybe (1) Oklahoma will agree to stay or (2) the Pac-12 may not take Oklahoma without Texas. Why would Texas stay in a conference without Oklahoma? Kansas just answered that question. If the LHN broadcasts conference games, then Texas and DIsney will have enough material to sell the LHN to major distributors on favorable terms and make all the money they could ever want (a second time over I suppose because they already have all the money they could ever want).

This could get really ugly for Oklahoma. Texas is trying to get everyone to agree to stay in a partnership where everyone is allowed to pursue their own interests at the expense of the other partners. Naturally, everyone with a viable option to leave has either already left (UNL, Colorado) or packed their bags (A&M). Now, Beebe is trying to convince those teams without an their own option to leave to submit themselves to the will of Texas and the Disney Corporation in order to hold Oklahoma by force. If that happens, it’s only a matter of time before the LHN will get its carriage deals and Texas and Disney make embarrassingly absurd amounts of money.

In sum, Disney and Texas have agreed to hold Texas fans hostage in order to extract rent from the other conference schools, and now they have the conference commissioner begging the other schools to submit in order to make the deal profitable so that he can save his job the conference.

Will Texas fans be bothered by any of this? Probably not. If they can’t see or don’t care that they’re allegiance has been monetized as a Disney asset purchase, then I don’t know how you they’ll figure out or care that Texas is actively exploiting other universities to make money. If you want to get technical about it, one University has made a deal with a major media corporation to extract money from universities that it’s supposed to be partners with. If you want to get really technical about it, a division of the state government of Texas has made a deal with a major media corporation to extract money from divisions of other state governments and a private religious institution. A limited number of alumni seem to be uncomfortable about this, but the vast, vast majority either don’t care (possible) or will never be able to put the pieces together (highly likely). Most of them just don’t have a clue.