Courtesy Houston Chronicle

(June 18, 2010) Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., a great dark comedy about the movie business, ends with the line "And they all lived happily ever after … until the next movie." And that, I reckon, is the best way to look at the pace of college realignment.

Presuming that Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe is correct when he says Fox Sports Net is bullish on the league’s future, the Big 12 likely has bought itself four years. If FSN re-ups with the league after 2011 for a period running through 2015-16, when the Big 12’s ESPN deal expires, it will be time to renegotiate in 2014 or early 2015, and the circus will reconvene.

There was, as you know, more realignment movement Thursday with Utah’s decision to join the Pac-10 as its 12th member. That clears the way for the Pac-10 to move forward, presumably in concert with FSN, to create its own regional sports network similar to the Big Ten Network and to negotiate a new deal with the expanded Pac-10, which it has under contract through 2011-12.

If that happens, FSN will have secured its Central and Pacific time zone slots for football Saturdays and will be content to write two checks rather than one, as it would have done had the five Big 12 schools from Texas and Oklahoma joined the Pac-10.

In Big 12 country, Texas will work on plans for a Longhorns network that, according to university president Bill Powers, also will include non-sports programming. IMG Sports, which handles the university’s marketing, will be involved, and Texas could take on investors like Comcast or Time Warner, much as the MLB Network did, to secure cable and satellite carriage.

The Big Ten network, which has content from 11 schools, receives 70 cents per month per subscriber in its coverage area; by that gauge, TV analysts estimate a potential sub fee for a Texas network would be in the 10-cent range, if that, for a programming package that, at most, probably would include one football game each year.

Oklahoma also will work on network plans, although athletic director Joe Castiglione said it remains uncertain if it will be a cable, broadcast or broadband entity. Beebe noted that Texas A&M has one of the nation’s most active broadband networks, airing dozens of events on the Internet each school year, and that network presumably will continue as well.

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