Sunday was a good day for Kevin Keyes.
The most competitive people always want more.
That's why Kevin Keyes was thinking about the ball he hit to the warning track in center field Sunday.
"Of course I think, 'Man, if I would have hit that a little farther.' I wanted it to go out. I'm still thinking that it could have gone out," Keyes said of the ball that could have been a grand slam. "But I got the sacrifice fly, so it was a quality at-bat."
Keyes had plenty of quality at-bats Sunday.
Don't look for talented wide receiver Brandon Collins to ever be back in a Longhorns uniform. Two felony chargers against him were dropped last week, but Mack Brown never takes back players who run into such difficulties. No question Collins' initial problems with the law and the NCAA Clearinghouse took away a featured wideout with great hands and hamstrung Texas' passing attack early last season, but he's done here.
He might look good in an Oklahoma uniform, but he has just two years of eligibility left, and transfers within the Big 12 lose two seasons. No word yet on the transfers of Texas safety Ben Wells or defensive tackle Russell Carter, either, but I'd guess they might drop down a level to I-AA ball to play immediately.
The next couple of weeks are going to be very exciting.
… Get ready for the next few weeks.
Seriously.
We’ve been through NCAA Tournament expansion, the coaching carousel, the seemingly-daily arrests on the Oregon Trail and all the talk about conference expansion.
And yet the next few weeks should be even busier, even news-ier.
Big 12 schools need to give two years notice if they are resigning from their current position.
The process of expansion takes some time. Even if a decision was made today to invite Nebraska and Missouri to the Big Ten, odds are, the move itself wouldn't even take place for another two years.
According to the Big 12 Conference bylaws, any member institution that wishes to withdrawal from the league "will in good faith" give at least two years notice. There is a catch, though. Any member wishing to vacate the league, upon giving two-years notice, will forfeit 50 percent of the revenue it would have received from the Big 12 during that time — with the money to be distributed to the remaining institutions in the conference.
Should the Big 12 and PAC 10 form the American Conference?
It’s important to know that the cable portion of the Big 12 contract is up in 2011, and that contract belongs to Fox, which also happens to be a TV partner with the Pac-10. It’s been said that the Pac-10 is desperate to get into the Central time zone. For this reason and others like former Big 12 commissioner and current Pac-10 commissioner Kevin Weiberg maybe thinking about wanting to combine the Pac-10/Big 12 networks, the conferences could form as one and be called the "American Conference," according to Brown.
Travel would not pose a big problem as proximity is pretty reasonable here.
Conference expansion talk is like middle school.
Every day it's another ridiculous rumor.
I heard from the commissioner's best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend that the SEC, ACC, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-10 are all going to join together and be called Big Six Pac.
OK, that's not technically one of the rumors floating around. But it's close to being as ridiculous as some of the things that have been mentioned.
It was all about tv markets and money. And nothing has changed.
"What we were concerned about, candidly, for Oklahoma, was survival," said then-OU athletic director Donnie Duncan, who with Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds put the Big 12 together. "We could not, in my opinion, be caught in a situation where we had 8 percent or less of the TV sets in the country and continue to be at the level that we all expected.
"It was a necessity to put the Southwest Conference and Big Eight together."
The need for schools to expand TV revenue was what brought the Big 12 together.
It could also be what rips the league apart.
That's great. ESPN ad revenues are up.
Disney did say that so far this quarter, ad sales at the stations and ESPN are up at double-digit rates versus 2009.
For the second fiscal quarter, Disney said its media networks segment overall, which includes ESPN and ABC, was up 6% to $3.8 billion. That performance includes lucrative affiliate fees that ESPN pulls in. Operating income was flat at $1.3 billion.
Bloggers that are reinventing sports media.
Bob watch. Bob Stoops went to Tampa. (Yes, it is a slow news day.)