“There was a man at Nebraska named Tom Osborne who you may know about, and Bill Byrne was the AD there at the time. Bill told me that Tom was absolutely livid about this change. He was OK bringing in Texas and Texas A&M. He was very un-OK bringing in Baylor and Texas Tech. By the time I got into the picture at Texas A&M, he was the AD at Nebraska but had also been out as a congressman for a while and was one of the more powerful people in Nebraska. You had this sort of resentment for how this conference came together. You also had a conference that was bound together by a contract.

“The Southwest Conference was a nice place to be, but it was so regional, the TV markets didn't see it as an attractive conference to invest in. That made sense. The disparity between a Rice University and a Texas was huge. So we had all those other problems out there. I was just a fan and watching this happen from the outside looking in. But just the context of how this happened, we had a conference that had a very unusual birthing process that wasn’t comfortable for all. Fast forward and the continued inequity of revenue kept the conference in a really unstable base. That’s what I walked into in 2009.”

* So, what makes the SEC so much better and more stable?