• The KillerFrogs

"Boren stands to absorb credit or soak up blame." NY Times

Shake Tiller

New Member
NORMAN, Okla. — College football fans tend to prefer that university presidents be seen, not heard. The University of Oklahoma’s president, David L. Boren, has been a flagrant violator of that precept.

He urged a 2006 loss to Oregon be expunged after the Sooners bore the brunt of poor officiating. He pledged in 2011, at the height of conference realignment, that Oklahoma would not be a “wallflower,” leaving open the possibility that it might depart the Big 12 Conference. And in 2015, he gave the league a public diagnosis of “psychologically disadvantaged” after none of its teams qualified for the first College Football Playoff.

These are the kinds of quotations that attract the wrong kind of attention in the college football fishbowl; one journalist compared Boren to the former Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table.

But Boren, who announced in September that he would retire next year after nearly a quarter-century as Oklahoma’s president, was not a typical university chief executive: neither a tweedy academic (though he was a Rhodes scholar) nor a professional administrator (though on his watch Oklahoma has climbed the annual U.S. News and World Report national rankings).

That first championship game will be played Saturday at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex., between No. 10 Texas Christian (10-2) and No. 2 Oklahoma (11-1), for whom a win will cement a spot in this season’s playoff but a loss will most likely end any hope of qualifying. However, since the game is a rematch of the conference’s two best teams — unlike most other leagues’ title games, which feature the winners of two divisions — it could backfire.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/...on=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below
 

AroundWorldFrog

Full Member
Boren is a

donkey-mouth-open.jpg
 
Yeah, he was such a “3D chess player in a room full of checkers players” that he couldn’t see the benefit of adding Louisville and one other when TCU and WVU joined...

He’s the one who let the ACC check mate the B12.
 

rifram09

Active Member
Yeah, he was such a “3D chess player in a room full of checkers players” that he couldn’t see the benefit of adding Louisville and one other when TCU and WVU joined...

He’s the one who let the ACC check mate the B12.

Ya, maybe. But the ACC still makes less than we do to this day... and they have Louisville and Pitt (the two we likely would have added along with WVU and TCU).

Plus at that time, the B12 had just negotiated a lucrative deal with their media partners after the departure of Nebraska and Colorado. The B12 was able to talk them into continuing to pay the same amount of money to 10 schools that they used to pay to all 12, meaning the remaining 10 got a pay bump. When A$M and Mi$$ou left, they were still operating under that paradigm. So if the B12 had expanded back to 12, they would have taken a per-team pay cut. And who knows, maybe Louisville and Pitt would have dragged us down in the media negotiations; they certainly aren't doing enough to make the ACC richer than the B12 currently.
 

Endless Purple

Full Member
Yeah, he was such a “3D chess player in a room full of checkers players” that he couldn’t see the benefit of adding Louisville and one other when TCU and WVU joined...

He’s the one who let the ACC check mate the B12.
These comments always make me wonder.

Louisville record in the Big East after their coach moved on at the end of the 2006 season.
2007: 6-6
2008: 5-7
2009: 4-8
2010: 7-6
Then invites go out for the Big 12. What about 6, 5, 4, and 7 wins in the Big East makes people think they would have rocked the Big 12? - (to have made that call in 2010)
 

ftwfrog

Active Member
What about 6, 5, 4, and 7 wins in the Big East makes people think they would have rocked the Big 12? - (to have made that call in 2010)
The same thing that made the BiG think that Maryland and Rutgers would have rocked the BiG10. They haven’t. And nobody thought they would. 10 teams is unstable. Especially with a championship game. Especially when that championship game is guaranteed to be a rematch. Especially when one of those teams is holding a ticket to the CFP and the other team is going to ruin that for you.
 

Endless Purple

Full Member
The same thing that made the BiG think that Maryland and Rutgers would have rocked the BiG10. They haven’t. And nobody thought they would. 10 teams is unstable. Especially with a championship game. Especially when that championship game is guaranteed to be a rematch. Especially when one of those teams is holding a ticket to the CFP and the other team is going to ruin that for you.
Maryland and Rutgers had a huge impact because of the New York on DC markets on the B1G TV channel prices. They were not invited for being good. That would have no bearing on Louisville to the Big 12 as the big 12 would not be increasing cable rates from .10 per subscriber to .90 per subscriber (or whatever the huge jump was) and the Louisville market is slightly less people than NY and DC combined.

There is nothing but rumor media innuendo that 10 teams is unstable. The 9 team SWC fell because it was all in Texas. 12 team conferences unhappy so they grow to 14. There is still grumbling about how the B1G schools and SEC schools do not like their current status and lost rivalries, but their conference networks pay too much. WAC 16 failed, Big East failed, Big 8 failed, I can go on. There is no magic safe number for a conference. The number of teams does not make a conference stable or unstable.

Agree, the Big 12 CCG is stupid.
 
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