AUSTIN, Texas — When the Longhorn Network launched in 2011, the 20-year, $300 million partnership with ESPN arrange Texas with its personal 24-hour tv showcase that despatched shockwaves throughout faculty sports some say can nonetheless be felt as we speak.
Rivals within the Big 12 Conference bitterly complained the swaggering Longhorns have been stomping over the remainder of the league, and would reap an unfair recruiting benefit amid that bathe of money. Some fearful Texas was about to turn out to be a runaway prepare in faculty athletics.
Twelve years after the studio lights flickered on, the community will quickly go darkish: LHN might be folded into the SEC Network when Texas joins the Southeastern Conference subsequent summer season. This educational yr is the final for a pioneering effort that compelled new NCAA guidelines, laid the groundwork for rising convention networks and performed a task in what could be a decade of realignment.
“Yeah, it was bold,” stated former Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds, the architect of the thought for LHN. “We built something we can be proud of … I think it’s a big loss for Texas to have to give it up.”
Dodds’ imaginative and prescient was to construct one thing that may elevate Longhorns athletics past soccer and basketball. He needed extra publicity for volleyball, softball, baseball and different sports. Once it received rolling, LHN would broadcast almost 200 reside occasions yearly from throughout all Longhorns sports – the primary reside competitors was a volleyball match – college commencement ceremonies and even pupil trend exhibits.
But within the tv enterprise, soccer is king. ESPN needed to faucet into an enormous Texas alumni base and the eagerness round a Longhorns program that had received a nationwide championship in 2005 and performed for an additional in 2009. It noticed Texas as a nationwide model that followers may watch throughout the U.S. if they’d the appropriate cable supplier.
“We’re going to cover (Texas) football like it’s never been covered before,” Burke Magnus, then senior vice chairman of school sports programming for ESPN, declared when the deal for LHN was introduced.
That meant a broad vary of behind-the-scenes programming, together with pre-game and post-game protection. Some of it was an excessive amount of: Former Texas coach Mack Brown was irritated that the community’s cameras have been all the time watching.
“Our rivals all got Longhorn Network and they watched us practice. They could text each other and say ‘so-and-so looked good,’’” Brown stated. “You had to ask to turn cameras off.”
One concept by no means got here to fruition. An ESPN government talked about in a radio interview that LHN was contemplating airing highschool soccer video games of a high recruit.
“I thought it was a great idea,” Brown stated. “I also thought it would never happen.”
He was proper. The blowback from Big 12 members was swift. Angry rivals thought of it a step too far within the recruiting wars.
“That can’t happen … Are you kidding me?” then-Missouri soccer coach Gary Pinkel stated on the time.
The NCAA rapidly dominated {that a} college or league-affiliated community couldn’t broadcast highschool video games.
But the emergence of LHN, coupled with the notion that Texas already held an excessive amount of sway over the Big 12, proved to be a tipping level for some. Colorado and Nebraska had already left the earlier yr. And by the beginning of the 2011 season, Texas A&M introduced it was going to the SEC. Missouri adopted the Aggies a couple of months later.
Dodds stated he believes these faculties would have left the Big 12 anyway. Still, he notes some irony within the Aggies’ departure for the reason that community initially was meant as a joint mission with Texas A&M as a result of he didn’t assume Texas had sufficient programming to hold a 24-hour operation. He additionally thought the colleges must pay for the community themselves and it could be simpler and cheaper for 2 faculties to do it.
Texas A&M declined. It wasn’t till Fox provided $3 million a yr, and ESPN countered with its even bigger deal, that Dodds realized Texas actually had one thing.
“A bonanza” of cash, Dodds stated. “It was just unbelievable.”
There have been preliminary struggles to safe offers with cable and satellite tv for pc carriers to get LHN in entrance of viewers. Critics snickered Texas created a community merely to point out reruns of Vince Young’s game-wining sprint to victory over Southern California within the 2006 Rose Bowl.
But LHN finally discovered its manner into extra houses, in entrance of extra viewers, and started to take form. Soon LHN was producing protection of all Texas sports, from rowing to volleyball to swimming.
And it needed to be good, stated Pat Lowry, vice chairman of manufacturing for ESPN.
“It was always about doing good television. I wanted the quality to be just as good as anything we saw on ESPN,” Lowry stated.
Some opposing groups have been suspicious and didn’t need to discuss with LHN reporters or allow them to into pregame warmups.
“There were times different coaches were like, ‘No we don’t want you to be in here,’” Lowry stated.
The cash ESPN threw at Texas in 2011 isn’t as stunning anymore. The Big Ten struck a $7 billion deal throughout three networks in 2022. Texas will land within the SEC simply in time for a brand new $3 billion convention take care of ESPN that offers the community the printed rights to all league soccer video games.
LHN might be shuttered with out the soccer staff delivering on the preliminary hopes. Since a 13-1 end in 2009, Texas has gone 91-72 with 5 shedding seasons and hasn’t received the Big 12. In this last yr of the community and the Longhorns’ last yr within the Big 12, Texas will begin the season ranked No. 11 and is the favourite to win the league.
The Longhorns residence sport Sept. 16 towards Wyoming might be on LHN. The community will broadcast a lot of the season for the defending nationwide champion Texas volleyball staff in addition to dozens of ladies’s soccer matches, males’s and girls’s basketball, softball and baseball.
By subsequent soccer season, LHN may have been absorbed by the SEC Network and numerous ESPN platforms and its studio might be closed, ending a one-of-a-kind community which will by no means be duplicated.
“I would want (people) to remember the quality and caliber of programming,” Lowry stated of LHN. “I think anytime you start talking about conference realignment, everybody will look at A&M leaving and going to the SEC as the beginning of all of this … That, I think, will be its legacy.”
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