August 12, 2023

You don’t have to dig too deep in any mess these days to find lefties from Hollywood and academia at the heart of things. Or sometimes a principled conservative fighting them.

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That’s certainly the case now with the latest round of football conference musical chairs. And with it, the old sport may be losing much of its fun, tradition, rivalry, and sportsmanship,

Sheer stupidity explains a lot of what happened, but there is also something more sinister at the heart of it in my opinion . The Mouse and his evil four-letter network, EPSN.

The big-money era of college sports began in the 1980s after the NCAA lost control over TV rights in a famous court case. With cable TV millions, ESPN and its broadcast sister, ABC, started signing up every big football and basketball conference. They also subsidized the proliferation of holiday season bowl games.

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But the Disney Corp. bought ESPN/ABC, getting them in bed with the same people who brought you affirmative action and DEI: the college presidents.

With cable TV money stagnating in the 2000s, even for sports programming, Disney pursued a strategy to weed out all but the highest TV ratings schools from its patronage. (Not unlike how Paul “Bear” Bryant used to overrecruit players, then ruthlessly cut all but the best. Getting rid of the players he no longer needed was the main reason for his infamous summer “two-a-day” practices)

Disney’s ESPN had TV deals with all the “Power 6” conferences 20 years ago, but in my opinion quietly sought to wreck two of them, the Big East and the Big 12, by encouraging other conferences to poach their members. This started in 2003 when the ACC took Miami (led by Donna Shalala), BC, and Virginia Tech, then gathered steam in 2011 when Texas and Oklahoma threatened to move to the Pac 12. Colorado, Missouri, and Texas A&M did eventually leave.

However, one guy threw a monkey wrench in all this. The president of Baylor, Ken Starr, the renowned lawyer, was going to be out in the cold, along with several other schools. He threatened to sue Texas and wage scorched-earth warfare in the state legislature if the Big 12 did not stick together. He got his way and then invented the modern “media rights” deal for the Big 12. Each school’s home game TV rights would be sold off in long-term contracts, making it nearly impossible to leave.

The Big East also recovered. It added some excellent football/basketball schools that just needed a major conference affiliation to crack the major bowl games. The Big East’s TV deal was coming up at the end of 2012 and Disney was either stuck paying them lots more money or watching a competitor get the now highly rated conference. So, of course, in my opinion, they got their puppets in the ACC to poach some more teams, Pitt and Syracuse, just as the Big East was trying to expand.

That set off the panic that finished the old Big East. ESPN even had the temerity to air a crocodile tear documentary on the conference, never once explaining who actually killed it.