Horns247 Board

Lets take a step back for a minute. Deloss has done a wonderful job improving the facilities at UT. He has vastly improved our branding, our finances and has done a good job with coaching hires and overall program quality. The deep pocketed alumni, the President of UT, the BOD and the faculty all admire and support him.

Deloss understands that people are upset when they don't get to see games. I have heard him say on more then one occasion that he would love for ESPN to back off of their terms a little in order to get the channel picked up by providers.

Why doesn't he put money where his mouth is and negotiate a lower payment terms for ESPN in exchange for lower asking price and gaining carriage in more households nationwide?

Oh right, he wouldn't love it THAT much. Deloss is a great businessman and great with finances, but those types tend to miss the forest through the trees at times. Sometimes it's ok to get less money now to gain more benefit later.

Yet Dodds is willingly allowing ESPN to screw the fans so we can't see games that were readily available.

I refuse to believe ESPN is doing anything on the LHN (in terms of broadcasting football games) without UT (i.e. Dodds) approval.

The funny part is they have no leveraging power, surely not games that include Wyoming and new Mexico. the gripes of a single fan base mean nothing.

Yet the end result is the majority is being screwed.
Second year in a row. Where will we be next year and 3 years from now?
What's going to change? Direct TV and Dish played hardball with Viacom channels and AMC and allowed them to go dark for 9 days.
There is no backup plan so Deloss has painted himself into a corner and the masses suffer.

This right here. If LHN was just picking up third tier games, so be it. But that is not what is happening. ESPN is purposely manipulating the pick-up process to push games to third tier that wouldn't otherwise be there. In my view, there is a huge business ethics conflicts here that ESPN is using their other businesses to further this even though it would be in the best interest of those other business to pick up the UT games at the first or second tier.

LOL

If Texas cared about the fans this would be a done deal already. This was never about the fans its was about money and exposure.

Exactly. If this was about the fans or even about the sports/athletes and exposure to a national audience the Deloss would have taken 5 to 10 mil or so a year and demanded wide spread carriage nationally even if it meant giving it away for 7 cents a sub.

The opposite is true all because it's all and only about the money.