Hurricane Boren alert. (pt. 2)

As I was writing this "catch up" three part series, I thought, "Man it is very conspicuous how night and day the behavior change of OU president David Boren has been".

Last month Boren was basically doing in realignment terms what is one of the last steps to leaving --- whipping up the Boosters to get them chomping on the bit to leave.

Then he went to the Presidents' meeting and came out toeing the company line and singing kumbaya.

I thought to myself, those are the actions of a man who is likely to get what he wants...I should write Berry Tramel and ask (as a fan of a reporter can sometimes do) to try to get him to get to the bottom of that.

I didn't even have to.   The BT bomber dropped two big articles on us that pretty much laid it out.

Boren says Big 12 expansion decision should come this summer

It's a great article that pretty much confirms the general gist of part 1 and gives a very, very clear view into the status of the Big 12 today.

It really displaced much of what I had for this part, so I would recommend reading that article.

(Really the only part I am again stumped by is the mention of Boise State as a candidate by Tramel when Boren clearly is very academically focused on his candidates.   Tramel seemed to get the importance of academic quality in realignment decisions now....I can only guess that Boren mentioned that Boise State has some love among some members in the conference who may want BYU and envision Boise as stop #2 on a western flight and Tramel took that opportunity to make a quick face-saving drumbeat as he championed Boise State last year.  ....Still I think everyone has to know that academically Boise State is reprehensible in the eyes of an academic blueblood university like Texas, which won't even consider the University of Houston...)

And there was this slightly delayed valentine from Boren to UT. 

One should probably consider it a makeup to UT boosters for throwing the LHN under the bus repeatedly lately.  To my reading it is basically Boren acknowledging that UT's new leadership appears to be on his side with the proposed reforms and he has made things harder for them in the last month by being so vocal about the LHN.

How David Boren feels about Texas

It seems like push has come to shove and David Boren's tough love technique against all odds may have gotten the Big 12 to a point where we may see peace and contentment in the conference in our lifetime.

Great for the Big 12, tough for the PAC and the ACC... Let's look at what might be available and the fallout of all of this in part three.