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Texas Longhorn TV Network: 20 Years, $300 Million With ESPN

The Texas Longhorns have their TV network. During conference realignment talk this summer, we thought something like this would happen. Here's the report from Sports Business Journal:

The Univ. of Texas today will announce a 20-year, $300M deal with ESPN to create the Longhorn Network, the first-of-its-kind channel to broadcast live UT athletic events, shoulder programming and non-sports university content. The Longhorn Network will launch in the fall and will be owned by ESPN, which will pay the school a rights fee that averages $15M a year, sources said. In addition, ESPN has committed close to $400M in production value to the channel over the 20-year term.    

So Texas is basically going to be rolling in the cash. The Longhorns budget for 2010-11 is already the nation's highest at $137 million.

Folks have suggested Mizzou could create their own TV network. Despite not being the most popular team in the network, I think Mizzou could do fairly well drawing from both the Kansas City and St. Louis markets.