ATrain wrote:http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr- ... 02034.html
Not exactly sure how the regent's threat to pull funding from UH athletics if they don't get an invite threatens the Big 12...
The president of the UH Board of Regents is trying to leverage Houston's political clout in the Texas Legislature to put pressure on the Texas schools already in the Big 12. It's widely believed that the University of Texas is standing in the way of other programs from the state of Texas that wish to join the Big 12.
There is a precedent for this kind of action in the Texas Legislature. Back in 2010, when there was talk of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado moving to the PAC-10 (now the PAC-12), Baylor used its legislative clout to demand that they be included in any realignment with the five Big 12 schools.
I'm a Texas Tech grad back from when there was still a Southwest Conference, and those schools had no compulsion about using political influence and intimidation to get their way.
That's how Baylor, when the Southwest Conference broke up, ended up in the Big 12. A Baylor alumnus on the finance committee of the legislature formed an alliance with senior legislators from Lubbock, and they threatened Texas and Texas A&M, both of whom were talking about leaving the Southwest Conference, with loss of access to the Permanent University Fund unless they took Baylor and Texas Tech with them, leaving Rice, SMU, TCU and Houston to fend for themselves. Baylor was the only private school admitted into the Big 12 until 2012, when TCU joined to replace Texas A&M when they bolted to the SEC.