the tindog coffeehouse

How many teams does the Big 12 Conference have to lose before it stops being the Big “12″? And when exactly is it no longer considered “Big”? We may find out pretty soon now that Texas A&M has officially declared they’re packing up their marbles and leaving the Big 12 for a shot at the bottom of the SEC.

The Aggies apparently weren’t too keen on their intrastate rival Longhorns getting their own television network, despite the fact that the Longhorn Network will be available to exactly seven households in America, none of which are in Austin. But logic has never been A&M’s strong suit, so they’ve chosen to abandon 100+ years of tradition and possibly as much as $30 million in exit fees in hopes that the SEC will let them in to their exclusive club. Yeah, good luck with that. Let’s see, how many Big 12 football titles has A&M won? How many BCS games have they gone to? How many National Championships have they won since the rise of the BCS? Zero. And yet they really expect to do better against the likes of Auburn, Florida, Alabama, and LSU?

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Alright, boys and girls. It’s time once again to dust off your NCAA Tournament brackets and pretend to know who will win every single one of the next 67 college basketball games. Odds that you’ll get them all right? About 1 in, well, a lot.

But here’s what I came up with. As always, I highly recommend not taking any of my advice, as I’m almost certainly wrong about 90% of these games. Consider yourself warned.

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The last four months have just been weird. Ever since I broke my leg in July, things have been off-kilter. Including this blog, I guess. I haven’t been as regular with my blog posts as I’d like to be, but I’m totally fine with that. I don’t need to post something every day or even every week. If you’re really that concerned about my day-to-day happenings, you can follow me on Twitter. Or marry me. Except I’m already married, so that’s probably not an option for most people.

Anyway, I didn’t really have anything in particular to blog about, so I thought I’d throw a bunch of random things into one big post and let you pick out the stuff you’re mildly interested in.

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I don’t wear Texas Longhorn t-shirts on game day. If Texas is the home team, I use my burnt orange Longhorns coffee mug; if they’re the visiting team, I bust out the white one. Meanwhile, I do wear a Horned Frog shirt on TCU game days and opt for my Fort Worth-themed Starbucks mug the day before.

But really, I’m not superstitious. Even though I listened to the same mix tape before each football game in high school. (I don’t remember what songs were on there, but I’m sure “Eye of the Tiger” was one of them.) And even though I ditched my Texas Rangers Claw and Antlers t-shirt last night halfway through Game 1 of the World Series when the Rangers were down 8-2. (And changed my Twitter avatar, which I had replaced with the Claw after the Rangers won the ALCS.)

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A couple of years ago, I commented on a great cover story in Texas Monthly about the big business of the University of Texas Athletics. Since then, it seems, that business has only gotten bigger.

According to figures from the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics, UT’s football program isn’t just the largest grossing team in the country (at $87.5 million), it’s also the most profitable (at $65 million). To put that in perspective, that’s $20 million more in gross earnings than the No. 2 entry on the list, Ohio State ($68.19 million gross), and the No. 2 most profitable school, the University of Georgia ($45.38 million net).

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Good news, people of Waco. Baylor’s not screwed after all!

In what can only be explained as a miracle (by football-loving Baptists, at least), the Big 12 has been saved from destruction, with the ten remaining members swearing allegiance to Dan Beebe and the unnamed sports network (*cough*FoxSports*cough*) that bribed them to stay.

Who would’ve guessed that at the end of the day all of this realignment mess was really just about money? Huh.

So for now, there are no 16-team superconferences. No realignmentpocalypse. No ripping of the very fabric of the time-space continuum. Heck, not even a single punch thrown (unless you count Vince Young’s pummeling of an irate OU fan outside a Dallas strip club). In fact, Big 12 ADs would be singing “Kum Ba Yah” right now if it weren’t for the fact that they were too busy counting their enormous stacks of cash.

Where, then, does that leave us?

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