The lack of foresight was three-fold:
-Conference realignment was even close to being finished. His clumsily pitched Oklahoma/Oklahoma State to get to 14. Admittedly not a bad option, but that was it with other conferences going to 14?
-Uh yeah, the money kinda matters in this case. Just shrugging your shoulders and not anticipating what the other conferences were going to get only a few short years later is not an argument.
-Not understanding the extreme value or lack thereof for a conference network not having national distribution. The "we will get that resolved later" strategy has failed miserably.
Apparently we are not allowed to evaluate his tenure on 2018 conditions. Much better to rely on what the outlook was supposed to be in 2011.
He was extended in March of 2017 until 2022. They could have let him walk pretty easily. Apparently your evaluation failed to sway the other board members. Sorry.
Guessing the future is a difficult thing. I can tell you the stock market will go up more than it will go down. And that no hedge fund managers are able to consistently beat the little old S&P500. I can not tell you which stocks to buy and I would have already bought them if I did. I did point out more than once that DirecTV was not a stock that I would buy or own because of its lack of growth well before the cord cutting phenomenon started and forced them into the arms of AT&T. I'd say the same about Dish except that Charlie is very good businessman. At least Comcast et al can offer broad band and phone service in addition to cable. But they cant go nationwide easily.
Lots of smart people, smarter than Larry Scott, work on Wall Street trying to figure out how to make money. Nearly all of them missed 2007 2008. You seem very intent on punishing him because he misread the tea leaves on the television industry future. He only had one other example to follow and decided to go for full ownership. He made a bet on his negotiating skills and he was wrong. Wrong in the sense that were just not earning as much off our channel as the others, but were still earning.
I cant speak to the other things you bring up. I suspect there was a lot going on in the board rooms at OU, OSU, UT, and their various legislatures boosters governors and power players that would never make any of those deals a slam dunk. They are all in the end culturally aligned with each other. We were always the odd duck in that conference. So the move west was easier for us than for them. We stuck with those bozos on the Pac's first flirtation with us. We bailed because UT gave us plenty of reason to leave.
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