A-B-C-D-E-F-G! ...... Won't you come and play with me?
When the Big 12 collegiate athletic conference invited TCU to join them as a replacement school for the departing Texas A&M yesterday, it really came as no big surprise. Over the past 14-15 years, TCU has done everything in the world it needed to do to build favor with the big boy schools that control things in this neck of the collegiate sports world. They had hired successful effective coaches, they had vastly improved their facilities, and they had proven their ability in football against top-flight competition. And along the way, they had turned a healthy profit, become a popular television player, and they had coalesced a supporting cast of power structure and political culture characters to direct and run interference for TCU on their way back to a first tier level BCS conference affiliation.
Today the Houston Post published a Department of Education report on 2009 football income at ten Texas universities. This bottom line tells the story pretty plainly. Look at the figures:
- Texas $93.9 million
- Texas A&M $41.9 million
- Texas Tech $26.2 million
- TCU $20.6 million
- Baylor $14.4 million
- SMU $12.5 million
- Rice $12.4 million
- UTEP $9.5 million
- Houston $7.5 million
- North Texas $4.3 million
As the dollar signs show, the University of Houston, my university, is on a later track to the same hoped-for destiny. UH is simply behind TCU on the capital improvements, record on the field, and the development of sociopolitical socko-squad backing for successful arm-twisting among the big boy decision-makers of Tier One college sports. We will get there. We just have to keep working at it. You don’t get the serious attention of a green-eyed monster like Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds of UT until you can hit him in the head with a payday that offends his most egregious fear of loss as an offer he cannot refuse.
That’s how far UH is from getting any positive support from UT that could possibly stack up and outweigh that school’s historic contempt, disdain, and regret over ever allowing UH into the old Southwest Conference in the first place back in 1976. We of UH do not count on UT ever coming around to our benefit. UH can only rise where UT has no power to prevent UH’s ascent. That says it clearly. UH must do all we are able to do to rise in spite of all that UT may do to actively or passively undermine our UH redemption.
Our University of Houston official slogan serves us well. – “In Time.”
In time, we will get there to Tier One in academics and athletics. It simply isn’t going to be now or anytime soon. And there may not even be a thing called the Big 12 by the time we get there. Those of us who can help at any level simply need to keep doing what we are able to support the Cougar Cause.
It’s a family thing.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 