Andrew Murawa is an RTC correspondent.

When it was announced on Wednesday that the University of Texas and ESPN had come to terms on a 20-year, $300 million agreement to create a 24-hour television network largely dedicated to broadcasting Longhorn sports, we entered a new era of college sports on a variety of different levels. What exactly this new era will look like remains to be seen, but the Texas move, which they have been angling in on for years, but most intensively since they turned down the Pac-10’s offer this summer, will reverberate around the world of college athletics.

Texas Keeps Expanding Its Reach and Redefining College Sports Media

First let’s look at some of the details of the deal. The network, launching in September, will be developed and managed by ESPN. According to the Austin American-Statesman, of the $300 million, 82.5% or $247.5 million is guaranteed to Texas, with the other $52.5 million promised to IMG College, which handles marketing and licensing for the university. According to Texas president Bill Powers, the university will receive about $10 million per year during the first five years of the contract, half of which will “be devoted to academic and faculty support” and half of which will head to UT Athletics. This $10 million annually will grow over the course of the contract, and Texas can expect an average of $12.4 million per year above and beyond their share of the Big 12’s television agreements. Currently, Texas receives approximately $14-15 million from those existing agreements (a number which will grow to $20 million next year with the departure of Nebraska and Colorado), and with the additional income from the new deal will earn more than $30 million per year from their television deals. All told, this new network is only guaranteed one football game and eight men’s basketball games, although it may get a few more in the early years of the contract and perhaps even more down the road. But, the crux of these numbers bears repeating: ESPN essentially gave Texas $247.5 million to air one football game and eight basketball games a year over the next 20 years.

This is by no means the first example of an individual school striking out on its own to pursue its own television contracts. Notre Dame’s football deal with NBC in 1991 was the first such example, and it was indeed a blockbuster, but given their lack of ties to a conference there were few immediate ripples. Gonzaga basketball has its own television deal with Spokane’s KHQ-TV and FSN Northwest, independent of the West Coast Conference’s television deals. And BYU, just this past summer, decided to break away from the MWC and move ahead as an independent in football, with a brand new contract with ESPN and with plans to air additional sports content on its own network, BYUtv. But given the size and stature of the Texas athletic department, this development is a whole different animal, and its repercussions are numerous and considerable.

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That’s Debatable is back for another year of expert opinions, ridiculous assertions and general know-it-all-itude.  Remember, kids, there are no stupid answers, just stupid people.  We’ll try to do one of these each week during the season.  We’re fairly discerning around here, but if you want to be included, send us an email with your take telling us why at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

This Week’s Topic: We’re a couple of weeks into conference play and early results are in on some of the contenders and pretenders.  Which conference race have you found the most compelling so far and why?

Tom Wolfmeyer, RTC contributor

The most compelling conference race this year is in the SEC.  The reason is that out of the twelve conference teams, only Auburn is so ridiculously bad so as to not cause problems for another conference team on a given night.  And hell, even the Tigers beat Florida State (y’know, the team that defeated Duke last week).  It’s a veritable trainwreck of a league this year, but what’s the adage?  You can’t take your eyes away from it, because you have no idea what will happen.  Which Tennessee team will show up — the one that beat Pitt and Villanova or the one that lost to Oakland and Charlotte?  Will Mississippi State gets its act together or will Renardo Sidney start throwing haymakers on some fans during a timeout?  Will Kentucky figure out how to play on the road or will they self-destruct due to selfish m*****f***** play?  Consider that the SEC East, by far the better division, has South Carolina at the top of its standings at 3-1.  South Carolina!  Three of the teams from this division projected to make the Tournament are 2-2 already.  On the other side, Alabama and LSU are on top.  This isn’t football, folks — those two teams have been largely terrible for the better part of the last three or four years.  Yes, this year’s most compelling league is the SEC, if for no other reason that nothing would surprise us about this basketball quagmire of a conference.

JL Weill, RTC contributor

Another year, another dog fight in the Missouri Valley. No unbeatens in the conference and all five teams with three losses or fewer have a chance. And as with most so-called mid-major conference teams, there isn’t a lot of meat on the pre-conference menus for any of the contenders. Wichita State beat Virginia and LSU, but they already have two losses in the MVC. Last year’s NCAA Tournament darling Northern Iowa took out Indiana and Iowa State but has three losses to conference foes.  The firing squad effect means that the team that finally emerges from the pack will be battle-hardened for the conference and postseason tournaments. It also means that there’s a good chance that for the fifth year in a row only one team from the MVC will make it to the NCAAs. While the conference has four teams in the RPI top 100, only one of them is in the top 40 — Missouri State — and Cuonzo Martin’s Bears haven’t beaten anyone of note. Finding an at-large berth from the MVC, even with an expanded field, could be tough. Wins are at a premium, and it’s a multi-horse race. Gotta love it.

Kevin Doyle, RTC contributor

It is anyone’s best guess as to what team will be the last one standing in the Atlantic 10. Throughout much of the non-conference slate, the Temple Owls and Richmond Spiders emerged as the frontrunners. Bill Clark and the Duquesne Dukes quickly knocked Temple off of their pedestal, while Richmond lost a heartbreaker to Bucknell at the buzzer in their final OOC game. Now, it is the school from Pittsburgh along with Xavier who are the lone squads undefeated in the A10. There are, however, five schools that are 3-1 in the conference who are nipping at the heels of the two leaders. You’d be foolish to think that the two teams up front won’t fall at some point in the coming weeks. Even Dayton—the lone .500 team in conference—has a supreme amount of talent and is fully capable of going on a run. But, losses at UMass and Xavier have set them back in the conference. Unlike many of the BCS conferences—although, the Pac-10 and ACC sure are weak this year—the Atlantic 10 is likely to only receive two bids to the NCAA Tournament this year. Ranging from 2-2 Dayton all the way up to 4-0 Xavier and Duquesne, there are a total of eight teams that are vying for an Atlantic 10 championship and that coveted automatic berth.

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The Lede.  There weren’t a multitude of games tonight, but that never stopped us before.  And in fact, there were quite a number of good storylines coming out of a Tuesday night of college basketball.  From the zaniness that is UT basketball to Calipari’s foul mouthed motivational techniques to Jimmer’s bombs to the continuing humiliation of a Clemson visit to Chapel Hill, it’s all here.

Brian Williams Was the Hero On This Night (C. Compton/AJC)

Your Watercooler Moment.  Tennessee’s Season is a Four-Month Comedy Show.  Honestly, if you told us that the next thing Tennessee plans on doing is crushing Connecticut by 40 points in Hartford this weekend followed by Bruce Pearl chaining Scotty Hopson and Tobias Harris to a dogsled to get back to Knoxville after the game, we’d probably just shake our heads and figure that you were telling us the truth.  It’s just been that kind of a season for the Vols, and all indications are that it’s only going to continue on the crazy track.  Witness tonight’s game-winning play against Georgia in Athens.  With Bruce Pearl still watching his team from home during his eight-game SEC suspension, UT’s Tobias Harris threw up a wild airball from the corner as regulation time was running out.  Somehow Brian Williams reached over the top of Georgia’s Chris Barnes and, as the refs all swallowed their whistles, wrestled the ball from behind Barnes’ head as they both fell backwards.  Williams then threw the ball toward the rim while pulling Barnes down on top of him, and, of course… it went in.  He later went on to say that he’s “Kobe mixed with a little Dirk,” clearly aware of the fact that Kobe and Dirk both get away with murder down the stretch of close games.  You can watch the sequence below, but with the win tonight, the Vols have safely navigated the more difficult half of the SEC schedule with Pearl suspended — UT will play LSU and Alabama at home with road trips to Ole Miss and Auburn next.  Again, we wouldn’t be shocked if they lost to Auburn and won the other three at this point — it’s been that kind of a season in Knoxville.

Tonight’s Quick Hits…

• Jimmer Pulls Up From the Marriott.  Yeah, his range is ridiculous, as witnessed by this jumper from Al Dillard/JJ Redick-range during the first half of BYU’s win versus TCU this evening.  Fredette only went for 21/5 assts tonight, bringing down his nation-leading scoring average to 25.8 PPG one week after torching rival Utah for 47.  The Cougars moved to 4-0 in the Mountain West, though, with the easy win, but they’d be smart to focus carefully on their road trip to play Colorado State this weekend prior to the massive showdown against SDSU next week.  The CSU game has all the markings of a classic trap game.

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1. When we list links in the Morning Five every day, we always hope you’ll click on them. Even though we don’t expect our readers to check out every single link in a given M5, we only put things up here that we think you’d want to read or that will provide the original source from a piece of information that we think you should have. We will not attempt to describe the story that Yahoo!’s Jason King published yesterday about the tragic bond shared between Billy Donovan and two of his former assistants, Alabama head coach Anthony Grant and Arkansas head coach John Pelphrey. It is something you simply have to experience for yourself. The RTC crew are not the types to fall victim to that old cliche that a sad story makes for extraordinary writing, or an automatically “better” or elevated story; so take our word for it — you need to read this. Allow us to also say that even though we finished reading the story with red eyes and our collective jaw somewhere around belt-buckle level, we are actually comforted by the fact that men like this — and their families — are in the business of influencing and teaching 18-22 year olds; not because they and their wives and children have experienced tragedy, but because of how they’ve rebounded from it. Now, before you even move on to link #2 in today’s M5, click the above story and read it. Then you can come back here and rejoin our little world.
2. There’s one thing Bob Huggins won’t have to worry about as he and his West Virginia squad trudge through the Big East schedule toward the post-season: freshman mistakes. Because he, um…has no frosh left. Freshman forward Kevin Noreen had surgery on Wednesday to repair a ruptured prepatellar bursal sac on his right knee and will miss the rest of the season. He was the last active Mountaineer freshman on the team out of the four that Huggins brought in this year.
3. Ever since Washington’s Abdul Gaddy tore his ACL, we’ve been waiting to see who would step up and lead the Huskies as both a vocal leader and a distributor of the ball. Jeff Goodman makes a compelling case that Isaiah Thomas has already taken on the task of filling that role. We were inspired to look up a couple of stats Goodman alludes to in the article that back up what he’s saying: last year, Thomas’ assist-to-turnover ratio was 1.3 to 1 and he sported an assist rate of 28.5 (tied for 438th nationally). This season, his A/TO ratio is up to 2.1 and his assist rate of 56.1 is tops in the Pac-10 and 56th nationally.
4. Word surfaced yesterday afternoon that former California freshman Gary Franklin will resurface at Baylor and will be eligible for play in the second semester next year. So, how’s Cal doing sans Franklin? Just fine, writes California Golden Blogs, specifically citing the 1.07 and 1.06 points per possession the Bears averaged against their last two opponents (Arizona State and Arizona, respectively), a level they had only achieved four times in the previous 13 games. Franklin will also enjoy being at Baylor more; you’ve got to shoot to be a scorer, and Franklin should run wild, given all those shots LaceDarius Dunn will leave behind in Waco next year.
5. Hey, check out those Colorado schools! Colorado is 13-4 and 2-0 in the Big 12. Colorado State is 11-5. Air Force is 10-5.  Denver is, er, 8-9…but 4-0 in the Sun Belt! The Denver Post’s Chris Dempsey shows us that, when it comes to making the NCAA Tournament, hope is alive in the Centennial State and with good reason. We hope at least one of them gets there. Of those schools, Air Force was the last to go — five years ago. And Denver has never tasted the sweet, healing waters of The Dance.

We’re not sure who coined the phrase, but we here at RTC like to talk about conference play as a “family” ordeal, and it’s an apt analogy.  For the power league schools who have spent the first half of the college basketball season traveling around to take part in various tournaments and other non-conference games against teams they’re generally going to beat, the new year brings with it better competition and recognition of those old familiar faces.  Not only is there an upshot in the talent level of the opposition on a nightly basis as well as a team’s oft-first exposure to a hostile road environment, but familiarity through wars of years past usually means that teams are no longer intimidated by the names on the front of the jersey.  Witness how Georgia beat Kentucky, Colorado knocked off Missouri and West Virginia downed Georgetown over the weekend — these teams see each other every year (often multiple times), so they’re familiar with all the beauty marks and warts, angels and skeletons, patterns and pretenses, associated with each.  Like we said, it’s akin to sitting down at the dinner table with your own family — there’s only so much BS you can throw before your big brother or mom will stare at you with an eye-roll and call your bluff.   

The Family Sits Together, Stays Together

With so much action every weekend the rest of the season, what we’d like to do with this column is briefly examine the major conferences post-mortem (probably Mondays) to see what important or interesting things happened that weekend.  This is not meant to supplant our After the Buzzer: Weekend Edition series nor encroach too heavily on our Checking In On… series for each of these leagues, but we feel that it’ll be an interesting way to track each conference race for those of us who might have a favorite league but want to lightly keep tabs on the others each week as well.   

Power Conference Rankings

1.  Big East.

• The nation’s best conference now has ten teams rated in the top 32 of KenPom, eight in the AP Top 25, seven in the Coaches Poll, and six in the RTC poll.  Talk has already developed about all of those teams (plus St. John’s as an eleventh) making the NCAA Tournament’s expanded field, and if the Tourney were seeded today, that would be reasonable.  But what’s not being said is that one, two or possibly three of these teams will tank and tank hard.  We saw it with Georgetown a couple of seasons ago and UConn last year — the brutal scheduling that the Big East requires simply is too much for some teams to handle.
• Georgetown is starting to look like one of those teams.  The Hoyas are at 1-3 with Saturday’s home loss to WVU with a home date against Pittsburgh looming on Wednesday night.  1-4 is nowhere you want to be in this league, especially with four games still to come against top ten teams Syracuse (twice), UConn and Villanova.  When the guards aren’t scoring, the Hoyas sputter.  Where’s Greg Monroe when you need him?
• Perhaps no team has been more disappointing than Providence in the early going.  Keno Davis’ team got off to a nice 11-2 nonconference start with a close loss to BC and a stinker to LaSalle as the only blemishes.  Marshon Brooks has played great, upping his scoring average by nearly 10 PPG and doubling his rebounding numbers from a year ago.  But after a weekend loss to Rutgers on Saturday, the Friars are now 0-4, effectively a death sentence in this league.
• To win this league, you need away wins to supplement a superb home record.  The top five teams — Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Villanova, Louisville, Marquette — all have one, but oddly, a pair of mid-pack teams — St. John’s and West Virginia — already have two.  It’s worth mentioning to be wary of teams that only win at home — we’re looking at you, Notre Dame (3-2) and Cincinnati (2-1). 

2.  Big Ten.

• Minnesota is the team in this league that the schedulers did no favors for this year.  After three road games to Wisconsin, Michigan State and Ohio State, the Gophers are rather predictably 1-3.  They were competitive in each game, even missing a game-tying shot at the buzzer against OSU, but close only gets you so far.  Now they’ve learned that Trevor Mbakwe has gotten himself into hot water again and could potentially miss games just in time for a home game (and must-win) against 4-0 Purdue. 
• Northwestern saved itself from a sure-fire road to nowhere by beating Indiana on Sunday to stave off an 0-4 league start.  Having done themselves few favors in the non-conference slate (Georgia Tech is their best win), you’d have to figure that a 10-8 conference record would be good enough, a 9-9 record would be borderline, and an 8-10 record would be suspect.  To get to 10-8 requires a 9-5 finish, a doable prospect considering that the schedule lightens up from here on out — the Wildcats are going to have to win some road games over bottom-half teams, though, starting tomorrow night at Iowa.
• Penn State and Michigan this year appear to be the two teams that will cause numerous headaches for the elites as they claw over each other to try to win the Big Ten and earn a high seed in the NCAA Tournament.  Both teams proved capable last weekend with PSU defeating Michigan State and Michigan taking Kansas to overtime, so it behooves the Buckeyes, Illini and Boilermakers of the world to take these teams seriously, home or away.
• Careful with Purdue.  Matt Painter is an exceptional coach and his team has handled the loss of Robbie Hummel (again) very well on the way to a 15-1 (4-0) start.  But the Big Ten schedule lays out nicely for the Boilers through the first seven games; if they can beat Minnesota without Mbakwe tomorrow night, they’ll have a great shot at going 7-0 prior to a late January trip to Columbus.  Then February is brutal. 

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Our conference correspondents around the world of college hoops get you caught up on the week that was in their conference check-ins. For the full articles, click the links or point your mouse to the “Conference Check-Ins” dropdown tab at the top of the page.

• ACC: Duke (15-0, 2-0) dominated UAB before getting the job done against Maryland.  Duke’s two close wins to start conference play might be cause for concern, but no one has waltzed through their schedule so far.  The Blue Devils are going to lose a couple of games this year, probably on the road when threes aren’t falling–and the other team is shooting well.  But wins are wins, and it’s very important to know how to win close games as well as blowouts.” (Matt Patton)
• Big Ten (The conference names will be hyperlinked to live posts): “The Big Ten powers continued to dominate this week, as Illinois, Purdue and Ohio State are a combined 10-0 in conference. The other teams though are starting to look very vulnerable. Michigan State’s loss at Penn State revealed some problems with the Spartans’ attack, while Minnesota doesn’t seem to have the firepower to hang with the top teams in the conference. And where is Wisconsin going to be when this all shakes out? The Badgers are the conference’s biggest enigma.” (John Templon)
• Big 12: “Outside of conference play, there were two more games of note.  Saturday, Texas dropped one at home to the ninth ranked Connecticut Huskies late in overtime by just a point.  Right now, the sense is that the Longhorns have solved the concerns from a year ago, but this Longhorn team actually sits at a worse record than the team that collapsed so epically last season.” (Owen Kemp)
• Missouri Valley: “The Missouri Valley Conference has been known historically as a guard-oriented league, but several teams are relying on their frontcourt players to lead them along:   Missouri State’s front line of Kyle Weems and Will Creekmore, Creighton’s Doug McDermott, Kenny Lawson, and Gregory Echenique, and Southern Illinois’ Gene Teague, Mamadou Seck and Carlton Fay are examples of players that are carrying their teams that are not necessarily guards.” (Patrick Marshall)
• Conference USA: “It took three overtimes to decide the winner of UTEP at UAB on Saturday afternoon. In a nationally televised game, the Blazers and Miners went back and forth with UAB coming away with a much-needed 100-97 win in their conference opener. The Blazers had been beaten by more than 20 points earlier in the week by No. 1 Duke. Before that, the team had won five in a row. As for the Miners, they had been winners of ten of their last eleven until Saturday’s loss.” (Stephen Coulter)

With all the ranked teams losing over the weekend, there was quite a bit of movement after the top six teams in this week’s poll.  QnD analysis after the jump…

(ed. note: we revised the original Top 25 after a data entry error surfaced)

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It was a light day all the way around, with only a handful of check-ins to present…

• ACC.  With a solid road win over Maryland and topping a streaking Providence, BC takes the honors this week.  The Terrapins led late in the game but couldn’t score for the last two and a half minutes.  Maryland did not score a single point down the stretch.  None.  Still, Steve Donahue and his players deserve the credit.  They took advantage of Maryland’s lack of a leader when it counted.  The Eagles have a solid team that has the talent to finish second in the ACC.
• Big Ten.  Gone is the subtlety of the ‘eleven’ hidden inside of the ‘Ten’ and, instead, we’ve got a conference logo that won’t have to change until they reach 20 teams. Despite the expansion to 12 teams, the Ten stays in the name. “Leaders” and “Legends” refer to the new names for the divisions in the 12-team conference. This isn’t little league, but all the Leaders will sound like they’re in first. I can’t wait till I have to write a sentence like ‘Ohio State now leads the Leaders by a game over Illinois,’ or some such nonsense.
• Big 12.  The biggest story on Saturday has to be the debut of top ranked freshman Josh Selby in Lawrence when the Jayhawks take on the USC Trojans. The Jayhawks have been a pretty good team in the early going and all eyes will be on KU to see how the team dynamic changes with the addition of Selby.

Here’s what we had go up on Monday…

• Big 12: The lone winner from the Big 12 on the day was from Colorado, who will soon be departing for the Pac-10. Tad Boyle’s team looked like a group turning a corner in a 26-point win over Oregon State. The Beavers are far from a good team, but Colorado might just be getting closer to being the team that many expected.
• Colonial: One: That’s the number of free throws Richmond attempted against Old Dominion in ODU’s 77-70 victory December 1. Conversely, the Monarchs attempted 20 shots from the charity stripe, hitting 15 of them. This is more than likely a statistical anomaly, but even so, it speaks to Old Dominion’s discipline and ability to limit the number of ways its opponents can score.
• Conference USA: What a start it has been for Donnie Jones’s Knights. UCF is out to a 7-0 start after beating in-state foe Florida 57-54 last Wednesday in Orlando. Jones, a first-year coach, defeated his old boss, Billy Donovan, in his first signature win since taking over the program.
• Horizon League: Fans unfamiliar with the Horizon League would assume that Butler is the team to find at #1 in this week’s Mid-Major Top 25. They’d be wrong. Butler has given way to Norris Cole and Cleveland State, who are all the rage as they take no prisoners.
• Missouri Valley: The Missouri Valley Conference is still showing signs that it has not risen up to a multiple bid conference once again.  Over the past two weeks, the losses against the Power Six conferences have continued to mount— Purdue,  St. Johns,  Notre Dame and Connecticut, to name a few.  The Valley is 3-11 against the power conference teams.

Not a lot of movement at the top of the polls this week as we move into the part of the schedule where schools generally lighten their loads around exams.  This poll will likely look very much the same through the holiday season.  Quick n’ dirty analysis after the jump…

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