It was as predictable as a lackadaisical road game for the Illini basketball team. Unfortunately, that stance is absolutely and positively dead wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone is forgetting the circumstances under which the SEC invited those two schools.
This is in contrast to the Big Ten, whose Big Ten Network can garner additional revenue from adding more basic cable households, and the Pac, who was so far behind in revenue that it was worth it for them to take a huge leap in order to add UT and friends. The fact of the matter is that the SEC loves the status quo. The last thing that the SEC wanted was to see major changes to the conference landscape where a third equal competitor would rise up or, even worse, being sent to a permanent third place position.
Texas legislators catch wind of the plan and use political pressure on those 2 schools to force Texas Tech and Baylor into the league, too. BC eventually gets an invite later on, while Syracuse is still in the Big East. The deal falls apart and Pac commissioner Larry Scott attributes it to the political heat from Texas legislators with Baylor getting left out. See a pattern here? State legislators have played a central role in all three major conference realignments in the past 20 years, including Texas legislators specifically in two of them.
Public universities are controlled by a ton of different interest groups, including people whose loyalties lie with competing universities. Notre Dame, as a private university, can simply listen to its own rabid alumni base in making decisions. If anything, it proves that Tech and Baylor have more pull than previously anticipated. The Texas legislature has literally done more to shape college conferences over the past 20 years than any other entity. As for OU, the Sooners are even more tethered to Oklahoma State politically than the Texas-based schools are to each other.
The T. Boone Pickens mafia will destroy that prospect immediately. As a result, those big brothers expended pretty much all of their political capital on conference realignment. This includes the prospect of UT going independent. If you believe Larry Scott, Baylor has to protected in order to ensure it gets approved, too. Some OU supporters are already ruing the day that they walked away from the Pac offer.
