Tuesday, July 26, 2011

A Potential Texas-Size Problem

There are rumblings at the Big 12 Conference meetings in Dallas this week. And surprise, surprise, the Texas Longhorns are the target.

So much for all these warm fuzzy feelings the remaining ten conference schools developed when Nebraska and Colorado left the league.

Texas is set to debut its own network next month. No other college team has sole possession of a network. Notre Dame plays most of its games on NBC, but it isn’t the Irish 24 hours per day on that network. So the Longhorns are definitely staking a new adventure here.

The main rub at this week’s meetings and in the past is the talk about Texas possibly airing Texas high school football games. There are people in the conference saying that this practice would give the Longhorns a tremendous recruiting edge.

That premise might be true, but there is a larger issue here. Texas should not be allowed to air high school games. Texas or any other team in the country should keep its nose out of televising high school sports. If Texas wants to feature its chemistry department on its network, fine. If Texas wants to feature team mascot Bevo eating grass, fine. But what is high school should stay high school and what is college should stay college.

It might be wise for the NCAA to stop this talk and declare that Texas or any other school thinking about aligning with high school sports in this way should forget it.

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