Bowlsby Takes to the Texas Capitol & Senate Committee to Force OU/UT to Stay Until 2025

STILLWATER – While the remaining eight schools left to ponder their future do just that, Monday the Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby made his way to Austin to argue in front of a Texas Senate Committee on the Future of College Athletics. Bowlsby was lengthy in his address and was warned to cut it short before the committee chairperson finally cut him off.

The Big 12 Commissioner was eloquent and poignant in his address. He used the just completed and released Perryman Report which was a quick economic study done by a Waco, Texas research group on how the loss of Oklahoma and Texas would impact economically the other campuses and cities in the Big 12 that OU and Texas will be leaving behind. The damage was well into the millions.

“With the disruption, the economies of the eight remaining universities are jeopardized, particularly the three remaining schools in the State of Texas,” Bowlsby started. “The Perryman Report details the particularly negative impact that this departure will have, but it does not detail to make the points that others will make today regarding student recruiting, bond rating, long range planning, and research dollars. The innate dependencies that are present in college athletic conferences extend way beyond the playing fields. Mutual decisions are made that rely on years of history and relationships with many millions of dollars in the balance with respect to those three schools. Not withstanding the obvious breach of trust the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas in Austin have violated the very bylaws that they help to construct. With the approval of the board, the remaining members of the Big 12, I have notified both schools with what I believe to be a violation of that obligation.”

Bowlsby went on further to state that their departure and the way that Texas and Oklahoma executed it were in direct violation of the way the bylaws of the conference and the grant in rights were set up. I have been told by an Oklahoma State University source that those grant in rights of the television rights is written tight and that legally, it will hold up in court.

“It is also a matter of record that our media rights are shared by all 10 of our members,” Bowlsby said addressing that issue. “This is an irrevocable grant of rights, that was written, edited, and adopted by the University of Oklahoma and University of Texas General councils and the Big 12 executive council.”

He summed up, what we all know by now, and that is this is an ugly situation that was made uglier by the secrecy and the deception that Texas and Oklahoma used to get it done.  

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Two of those uniforms will be going away. The question is how soon?

“Under the best of circumstances, the departure and transfer of institutions from one athletic conference to another are messy and heartbreaking,” Bowlsby said under duress as the chairperson was encouraging him to wrap up. “They always are and the always will be. I acknowledge that those institutions have the right to envision their future and act upon those visions. Regrettably and inappropriately these two institutions chose to ignore their prior commitments and chose to move ahead and deceive the institutions with which they pledged their loyalty.”

Politics, I’m not sure it can do anything here. I guess the one thing is Bowlsby has it on record. When the Governor of Texas is a University of Texas grad as are many legislators, I’m not sure who will be rushing to jump in on this from the political side.