How the University of Texas is saving College Football as we know it.

There are few things that play a bigger role in creating the landscape of college football more than money and after the conference re-alignments of the past few weeks, it may be safe to say that money is the biggest thing.  Texas A&M's planned move (which became official yesterday) to the SEC opened Pandora's Box for teams across the nation to abandon ship and move to the conferences that are perceived as safer and have a better long-term outlook.  Two Big East schools quickly moved to the ACC and more seem to be ready to come over as well (unless the ACC can somehow pull off convincing Notre Dame to leave years of football independence and join).  Now with Texas A&M gone, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St., and Texas all began looking west to the Pac-12, and the Big 12 seemed all but lost.  As the days went on, reports came out that Texas was unwilling to agree to the Pac-12's revenue sharing agreement due to the increased revenues they were generating from the Longhorn Network.  Soon after these reports, the presidents of the Pac-12 schools released a statement saying that they were no longer interested in further expansion of their conference.  The Longhorn Network had saved the Big 12.

When the University of Texas' created the Longhorn Network they may have been criticized for selling out some of the members of their conference for more money, but they also hit a goldmine by tapping into their national fan-base's willingness to pay to see their team play.  Almost every conference has revenue sharing guidelines that would require Texas to evenly distribute all of the proceeds from the network between the other schools of their conference, except for the Big 12.  Since rumors started of the demise of the Big 12, it has been the fact Texas will not be able to move without giving up the network that it values so much, keeping the conference together.  There have been shake-ups in the governing body of the conference but in the end it is the money that Texas is generating from their own network that will keep the stability.

With the Big 12 going nowhere, NCAA football will not have the drastically changing landscape that many had predicted.  Schools will not be scrambling to move to four "Power Conferences" of 16 teams each, lest they get left behind to be an afterthought and demoted to never making it off of the score ticker on ESPN.  The money that schools generate from college football seemed to be pushing the need for the Power Conferences. With the new power conferences, the biggest and best schools could get all the money, and the ones without the prestige or financial assets of the bigger schools would no longer be a thorn in the traditional football powerhouses side.  The football distinction of the University of Texas, and their aspirations of even more money are holding together a the fragile foundation of college football by keeping together their conference and thus keeping all of the other schools in the NCAA comfortable, for now...

-Written by Kevin