Uruguay better than Longhorns

The usually dour Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim talked with the Monday Morning Quarterback Club of Birmingham this week – the Grim Reaper, I take it, was booked – and delivered a great line on the folly of super-sizing the major college conferences.

“If conference commissioners were the founding fathers of this country,” Boeheim said, “we’d have Guatemala, Uruguay and Argentina in the U.S.”

The remark is notable for three reasons:

 • The man who spoke it is not known for his knee-slapping quips.

 • In 35 years as a sportswriter, I’d never once typed the word “Uruguay.” Now I’ve typed it twice.

 • About 24 hours after Boeheim took the conference commissioners to task, the Pacific-12’s Larry Scott scuttled an expansion plan that last weekend appeared inevitable.

Big 12 heavyweights Texas and Oklahoma were heading west, along with Texas Tech and Oklahoma State. The poaching of a league that already lost Nebraska and Colorado – and likely will lose Texas A&M – would’ve rendered the Big 12 obsolete, while transforming the Pac-12 into a ’roided-up Loch Ness Monster, with one foot in the Puget Sound, the other in the Gulf of Mexico.

As Ron Fairly would say, that’s some kind of footprint.

Enthusiasm for a Pac-16 was steeped in the belief that bigger is better. That was it.

Pac-16 proponents never considered the fact the Big Eight was operating like a well-oiled machine until it grew into the Big 12, shorthand for “Texas and the 11 Dwarfs.”

As the largest and most prominent university in a state that includes such major TV markets as Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, the Big Eight regarded the annexation of Texas into its league to be a coup.

Some coup. Texas joined the Big 12 and eventually made its own rules with the creation of the Longhorn Network, a $300 million partnership with ESPN. Texas has not been inclined to share the revenues of its bold venture with the rest of the conference, which is understandable: You want your own network, Kansas State? Go for it.

Not as understandable was Texas’ insistence on using its network to televise high-school games, giving a school with every imaginable recruiting advantage still another recruiting advantage.

Nebraska and Colorado learned enough about the Longhorn Network to bolt the Big 12 at the first opportunity. Texas A&M has followed the cue with its decision to jump to the Southeastern Conference in 2012.

Missouri wanted to transfer to the Big Ten last year and was rejected – for Nebraska.

In other words, until last weekend, Texas and its Longhorn Network appeared responsible for busting up a conference whose roots go back to 1907.

Then something remarkable happened: Larry Scott weighed the benefits of all those TV sets tuned in from Texas against the headaches of attempting a sustainable relationship with a school determined to retain revenues of its own network, and he came to the conclusion that 12 was enough.

After all, Scott presided over a milestone revenue-sharing agreement last year by convincing the Los Angeles schools – USC and UCLA – to make some concessions. The compromise produced a $3 billion national television deal, along with a Pac-12 TV network augmented with six regional networks.

To recap: A year after USC and UCLA were willing to compromise on revenue sharing, Texas wasn’t willing to compromise on revenue sharing. So the Pac-12 told the Longhorns to scram, temporarily preserving what’s left of the integrity of major-college conferences.

Texas and Oklahoma are back where they belong, in a Big 12 whose survival was contingent on the Sooners’ demand that commissioner Dan Beebe be replaced by somebody not perceived as the Longhorns’ puppet.

More relevant to those of us on the West Coast, Scott declined the opportunity to serve as the Longhorns’ puppet. The commissioner has no philosophical qualms with expansion; he’s not on some crusade to preserve regional rivalries and glorious traditions. He turned down Texas because the Pac-12, as he put it, has achieved a “culture of equality.”

“We took a hard look at this,” Scott told ESPN Los Angeles, “but at the end of the day, we’re in such a great position as a conference with record-setting TV deals. We’re really leading the way in college sports in a lot of ways right now, so we’re not going to jump at anything. It really had to be right.”

By “right,” Scott meant amenability to revenue sharing. Texas wasn’t a bad fit for the Pac-12 because it’s a gazillion miles removed from the lifestyle of the Pacific Coast. Texas wasn’t a bad fit because of the absurd travel problems it presented for basketball teams and volleyball teams and baseball teams from the Northwest.

Texas was a bad fit because it refused to budge from its winner-take-all position on the Longhorn Network.

While Larry Scott’s motives might not have been grounded in noble principle, he stood up to the bullies and sent a message: When you’re a commissioner contemplating expansion, don’t mess with Texas.

john.mcgrath@thenewstribune.com