News that Kevin Weiberg was leaving the Big 12 Conference front office hardly struck Sunflower State soil like a thunderbolt.
Even though he was league commissioner – a position perceived as powerful – Weiberg’s profile was lower than the attendance at a Baylor-Colorado basketball game.
Still, Weiberg’s low-key personality had less to do with his wispy visibility than did his inherent inability to wield a big stick. Commissioners are mostly puppets – dangling on the strings of owners in pro sports and presidents and athletic directors in college sports.
In the pros, the wealthiest owners – think George Steinbrenner – swing the biggest clubs. In the Big 12 Conference, the richest schools – think Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska – hold most of the cards.
In the Big 12, the rich become richer, and the poor : well, they aren’t exactly at poverty level, but the poor are relegated to perpetual plebeian status by conference revenue-dispersal policies.
For example, home football teams keep all the receipts, while the visitor receives nothing. Texas, Texas A&M and Nebraska average nearly 80,000 fans per home football game. Kansas’ average home attendance is about 40,000. How fair is that?
What’s more, the league’s big football schools command more lucrative television appearance money, simply because of who they are. And they don’t have to share that talent fee with the rest of the league.
Back in the early 1970s, the old Big Eight Conference, precursor to the Big 12, lost its commissioner when Wayne Duke took to a step up to the higher-paying, more prestigious job as commissioner of the Big Ten Conference.
Now the Big 12 Conference has lost its commissioner to the Big Ten, but Weiberg isn’t becoming the Big Ten boss. He’ll be an associate commissioner. They can put whatever spin they want on it, but no way can that be construed as even a parallel move.
Did Weiberg leave of his own accord, frustrated by his inability to bring more fiscal parity to the Big 12? Or was he forced out by the league power brokers who want to make sure they maintain a stranglehold on their golden goose?
We may know more when the league announces Weiberg’s replacement, probably sometime later this summer.
Conventional wisdom would put a current league athletic director into the forefront for the role. Texas AD DeLoss Dodds, for example. But why would Dodds exchange his position as the most powerful AD in the conference for one of basic impotency?
I’ve seen Kansas’ Lew Perkins’ name mentioned, too. That won’t happen, either. Perkins, a master behind-the-scenes manipulator, could not operate in a hands-tied position. And why would the highest-paid AD in the Big 12 take a pay cut anyway?
I’ll be surprised if the conference sultanate doesn’t elevate interim commissioner Dan Beebe to full status. Beebe reportedly has a stronger personality than Weiberg and would be more of an up-front guy. Not that it really matters.
When nitty comes to gritty, the Big 12 Conference commissioner’s primary task is to negotiate the most lucrative television and bowl contracts possible, then quietly fade away.
