Shatel: Texas' network looks like a reach

If a TV network is on and nobody sees it, is it really on?

The vaunted Longhorn Network, already the most overrated player of the 2011 college football season, unveiled itself to the world on Friday night. We think.

If anyone out there in TV land actually saw the LHN debut last night at 6, give us a call. Or, better yet, call Texas Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds to let him know you're out there. The first five callers will get free tickets to a future Texas-SMU game.

ESPN, broadcast partner with UT, has had a hard time finding carriers for the LHN. That includes Time Warner, which covers most of Austin, Texas. DirecTV said no. Verizon FiOS is the only major carrier to sign up, and it won't start until Sept 1. So the LHN anchors can pretty much show up in t-shirts and boxer shorts for the next week.

Late Friday, the LHN announced four small carriers in Texas signed up for duty. If you had Texas Mid-Gulf Cablevision, you're in.

So the Big 12 is teetering on destruction because of this?

Well, not really. Nebraska and Colorado left last year when nobody would commit to the league. And Texas A&M is possibly off to the SEC because of its 100-year status as little brother to Bevo.

The LHN is the alter ego of the ego that threatens the future of the Big 12. But look closer and it doesn't look so dangerous at all.

The first three sporting events on the channel are Texas volleyball matches. Then there's a women's soccer game on Sunday.

There will be plenty of shows with Mack Brown sitting around the fireplace telling stories with Major Applewhite and Colt McCoy. Maybe Earl Campbell can do a barbecue cooking show. There will be two or three Texas football games. Probably a few old Texas-Arkansas games to relive over and over and over. And, yes, high school football eventually, in some form.

I'd rather watch "Man vs. Food'' reruns.

Is this the wave of the future? Is this MTV? Or will the LHN be like a new fall series that's canceled after a year or two?

Hard to imagine the latter. ESPN has $300 million invested. It has to make this work. It'll run Texas "SportsCenters'' and "Around the Longhorn" if that's what it takes.

But can you imagine anyone, even the hard-core Bevos, wanting to watch Texas sports 24-7?

Don't ask Shot Kleen. He just smiles sheepishly.

Kleen is Nebraska's assistant athletic director in charge of HuskerVision. On Thursday, he told me of the detailed plan Nebraska had more than a year ago to launch its own version of the Longhorn Network.

It never made it off the planning board, and Kleen said that may have been a good thing.

"We were working with IMG, our sports marketing partner, looking at programming,'' Kleen said. "The first thing we looked at was how to distribute it and who would get it. It would be an issue for us because we don't have that many TV sets in Nebraska. But even if we did that, we were reaching our fans but not reaching a lot of potential recruits.''

Kleen said Nebraska was looking at a partnership with Big 12 TV partner Fox, which has an army of regional networks. The Husker Network would have been regional, though Kleen said they never got far enough to figure out the boundaries of the region.

So how many times can you watch the 1995 Nebraska football highlight film?

"We would have put all of our current coaches shows on there,'' Kleen said. "We did have plans to get a lot of the old '70 and '71 games. It seems we have a reunion every year or so, so we would do a program on that.

"But one of the hangups is we couldn't run many legacy games. We would have had to negotiate and pay a certain amount of money to show them. The networks (ABC and ESPN, NBC, CBS, Fox) actually own those games.''

Kleen said the big money-maker would have been putting the handful of pay-per-view Husker football games on the network. He said NU would have done "a lot of things with IMG, our 'Sports Nightly Show,' roundtable discussions with local writers, things like that.''

There's a kicker to that list.

"Believe it or not, at the bottom of our list was 'High Schools' with a question mark,'' Kleen said. "Things that Texas has thought of, we thought of, too.''

The Husker Network showing high school games? Very interesting.

Chances are none of it would have happened. Oh, NU would have "put our toe in the water,'' as Kleen said. But as he said, a Husker Network would have had to be on cable systems, and that would have required a customer fee. Who outside the state would pay that?

Look at the small population base in the state, the fact that Fox regional is not ESPN, etc., etc. Would it have been worth it?

"I think you have to weigh what you're giving your fans and potential recruits,'' Kleen said. "It would have been hard for us to make a profit for a number of years.''

Three years? Five? Seven?

"A long ways out,'' he said. "The lucky part was, as we were getting into it, the Big Ten came along and invited us. That solved all of our problems.''

Exactly. Nebraska may have tried it, but Nebraskans wouldn't have stood for losing money on the network for years. A network for an individual school is a risky, flawed concept. It doesn't appeal to a broad audience. Why haven't Texas A&M or Oklahoma just done what Texas did? Because unless you are a brand name, and you have ESPN money on your side, it's a bad idea.

It still looks like a bad idea. Texas and its buddy ESPN will have to prove otherwise.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1025, tom.shatel@owh.com

twitter.com/tomshatelOWH

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