Texas Agrees to Stay in the Big 12

By PETE THAMEL

Published: June 14, 2010

Left adrift amid the chaos of conference realignment, the Big 12 on Monday found an improbable savior.

Furious 11th-hour television negotiations by the Big 12 commissioner, Dan Beebe, pulled the league from oblivion, ensuring its financial future and maintaining its 10-team membership. Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M — the Big 12’s bedrock teams — announced Monday that they would remain, staving off attempts by the Pacific-10 and the Southeast Conferences to lure them. Because of an influx of television money from Fox the Big 12 will survive with 10 teams.

The decision brings some stability to the volatile landscape of college sports and, at least temporarily, halts the creep toward the evolution of 16-team superconferences.

“I’m am pleased for all of us involved in higher education and intercollegiate athletics,” said the Big East commissioner, John Marinatto. “I truly hope that this ends the conference realignment frenzy and stabilizes the landscape for all of us.”

In a telephone interview Monday, Beebe said: “We’ll keep it going.”

His statement spoke to the future of the Big 12, whose survival could be equated to 99-yard touchdown drive with less than a minute remaining and no timeouts.

“The decision to stay in the Big 12 represents a consensus position which resulted from a collaborative effort with our colleagues in the conference,” Oklahoma’s president, David L. Boren, and its athletic director, Joe Castiglione, said in a joint statement. “We value the strong working relationship that has been reaffirmed during this process among the conference members.”

That may sound homespun, but negotiations were sometimes ruthless. In the end money and television proved the ultimate drivers to an agreement.

The Big 12’s television future, however, is complicated because it has two deals — with ABC/ESPN and with Fox — that end at different times.

The Big 12 is making only $20 million a year in the final two years of its deal with Fox, which controls about 60 Big 12 games. The ESPN/ABC deal is about $60 million per year for just 18 games through the 2015-16 season, although those are the top-tier games. The deals also include basketball games, which slightly skew the numbers.

Renegotiating existing deals or providing a new television deal for secondary games, which are now shown on FSN, provided the fiscal initiative to keep the league together. Although it was uncertain whether Fox renegotiated its existing deal or extended the current deal past 2011, television revenue from Fox clearly had a large impact on saving the Big 12. The new deal could generate as much as $5 million to $7 million per university per season.

The math can be fuzzy. The conference title game, an annual moneymaker for the Big 12, is in peril because the league no longer has the minimum 12 teams the N.C.A.A. requires to hold the game. It could petition the N.C.A.A. to maintain it with 10 teams, and the N.C.A.A. has considered changing that rule.

The counter-argument is that with fewer teams, the pie would be cut fewer ways and free up more money. And the new cable deal, which was always considered a bargain for Fox, could be enough to deliver additional revenue.

The linchpin of a 10-team Big 12 is Texas, which would still earn more money than its conference partners through the conference’s distribution plan, which favors teams that appear most often on national television. (The uneven distribution had always been a sticking point for Nebraska, which recently left to join the Big Ten.)

If Texas had gone to the Pac-10, that conference was expected to start its own television network. That would have meant that Texas could not have operated its own local television network, Bevo TV, something that would have cost the Longhorns millions every year. The key to the SEC’s deal with ESPN is that the universities can make millions from their own local television rights.

Although the Pac-10 is expected to add Utah and the Big Ten could still explore further expansion, Monday’s decisions certainly have calmed the landscape from the chaos of the last two weeks.

Because Texas decided not to venture west, the Big 12 is no longer adrift.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 15, 2010, on page B11 of the New York edition.