https://www.espn.com/college-footbal...laims-no-merit
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I can't imagine ESPN would sit on the sidelines while $1 billion in tv contracts on the table with a decaying conference potentially plays out. They definitely had to backchannel communication to get conferences to poach from the Big 12 with that already dead conference just sitting there slowly bleeding hundreds of millions from them.
Heard and an interesting stat the other day on the radio. Texas and Oklahoma each average over 3 million viewers per game on tv. Care to guess how many on the average the other Big 12 teams average? Under 900K. Getting out from a tv contract with a Texas-less and Oklahoma-less Big 12 makes way too much sense for ESPN. So I totally believe it.