[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Amazing to see this all play out. Who would have ever thought that this situation would evolve to the point where a school would consider cancelling a game rather than having it televised on a TV network?

All That and a Bag of Mail: How Big of a Disaster is the Longhorn Network? : Outkick The Coverage

With news that Texas Tech might cancel a game to avoid appearing on the Longhorn Network, how big of a disaster is the LHN?

It's a Titanic like disaster.

ESPN got stuck holding the bag, but it could just as easily have been Fox. ESPN won the bidding and lost the network war.

I mean, I can't even think of any business decision that ESPN has ever made that has played out this poorly. Can y'all?

Maybe the mobile phone business. Remember ESPN Mobile? That failure cost a ton of money, but at least then you could blame being ahead of the market's desire. I mean, people did want to use their phones to keep tabs on sports and their lives, the technology just wasn't good enough yet. So ESPN Mobile was too forward thinking. But the LHN?

No one wants the network. Now or ever. Hell, Texas even had to pay $70,000 to get the network on in its own dorm rooms last year. The games suck, the revenue is pathetic, yet the LHN is continuing to create instability across the entire Big 12 and by extension across all of college football.

If Texas had just gone independent I think things would have been smoother for the rest of college football.

Texas A&M, Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri are all in different conferences because of it. So are TCU and West Virginia. By extension so are SMU, San Diego State, Boise State, Pitt, Syracuse, basically it all spirals back to the LHN and the instability of Texas in the Big 12.

In historical terms, the Longhorn Network is the football equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. One set off World War I, the other set off realignment.

ESPN is so profitable in other arenas that the LHN failure is just a rounding error on its books, but this is still an amazing swing and miss.

At what point do they just roll the LHN programming into the existing ESPN structure and give up on distribution? That has to happen soon, right?