![]() ![]() Then, after it was made, they were quite transparent with the medical information they used as the basis for their decision. (At least publicly.) A key reason for this is that Scott and his team kept all the major stakeholders apprised of the decision-making process as the decision was being made. The Pac-12 made the same decision on the same day, but that league’s commissioner Larry Scott - who has learned the hard way during his 10-year tenure how it feels to lose the AD group - did an excellent job in this instance of keeping everyone on the same page. That isn’t easy for anyone to navigate, much less a man who only recently entered this particular and peculiar corner of the sports universe. That delicate procedure required Warren to thread the needle between presidents who wanted to postpone and those who didn’t, politicians who wanted to postpone and those who didn’t and a group of athletic directors who nearly unilaterally wanted to play. If six leagues play as planned this fall and four leagues (including the Big Ten) do not, Warren will be the most scrutinized figure in college sports because of the way his league’s decision happened. (Not Big 12-in-2010 dysfunctional, but that’s a high bar to clear.) And the root of that dysfunction seems to be the leadership of a newcomer who seems to only now understand the depth and breadth of the constituencies a major college league commissioner must satisfy. Iowa, Ohio State and Penn State have not exactly endorsed the decision.įor a league that for decades seemed like the model of alignment, the Big Ten has looked shockingly dysfunctional. Meanwhile, Nebraska has continued to make abundantly clear that it opposed postponement. The fallout from the league’s decision has sparked anger from coaches, athletic directors, players and parents at multiple schools who felt the Big Ten still hasn’t offered any transparency in its explanation of the decision to postpone six days after releasing a football schedule that officials bragged was flexible enough to give the league some time to make a decision. The Big Ten’s current issues are almost entirely internal. In the Big 12, the league was being ripped apart from outside and from within. In some ways, what Beebe faced was more difficult than the situation Warren faced this month when several schools - most notably Nebraska - bucked at the league’s decision to postpone fall sports because of COVID-19. The push and pull from the power brokers in a dysfunctional league finally caught up to Beebe, who has settled into a consulting role and does not miss moments such as the one when the chancellor of a university system called Beebe and demanded to be the point person instead of the president of the actual campus that belonged to the Big 12. The following year, with Texas A&M and Missouri about to head to the SEC, Beebe was ousted by a faction led by Oklahoma president (and former governor and U.S. That, combined with the choice by Texas to create its own cable channel instead of casting its rights into a planned Pac-16 Network, allowed the league to survive even though Colorado left for the Pac-10 and Nebraska decamped to the Big Ten. Nebraska, seeing everything falling apart in the Big 12, also sought refuge in the Big Ten.īeebe helped hold the core group of the league together by working an 11th-hour deal with ESPN and Fox that would allow 10 schools to make the same money 12 schools made before. Missouri wanted out - preferably to the Big Ten. The Pac-10 had approached Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech about joining. Though there was no global pandemic, Beebe’s Big 12 teetered on the brink in 2010. Beebe is one of the only people who has worked through a situation anywhere near similar to the one first-year Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren is dealing with right now. ![]()
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