FanHouse Big 12

It's no secret the economy has had an adverse effect on most industries.

Initially athletics seemed like they might be insulated from the strife. But more and more we've heard of professional teams struggling, big-time donors having to give less and athletic departments having to monitor copy machines.

Texas A&M, one of the premiere schools in the Big 12, announced Friday that it's having to cut 17 positions from its athletic department in order to balance the budget. Facilities director Billy Pickard, 75, apparently is one of the casualties although he is the lone remaining link in the department to legendary football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant from the 1950s.

For a rather wild day, it looked like things were going to get even weirder than they usually do in the college basketball offseason. Even before the summer recruiting began. In the end, it was a lot of noise but no change. Xavier and C.J. Henry are still going to Kansas for the 2009-10 season, not reversing field to go to Kentucky to be with John Calipari.

Xavier Henry is one of the top-5 high school players in the country. He had already switched his commitment from Memphis to Kansas, but since he could not sign a new National Letter of Intent (NLI) he is not actually bound to Kansas until he shows up on the campus and signs the scholarship papers. His older brother, C.J. Henry, is a walk-on with the New York Yankees paying his way following a failed baseball career.

It's hard to argue with much when a team goes 12-1 and comes within a lucky last-second play of going undefeated during the regular season as well as having a chance to play for the national title.

That is unless you play in the backfield at the University of Texas, where high production at running back is an expectation. The Longhorns, relying heavily on a group of inexperienced running backs, didn't put up the kind of running numbers that have become commonplace in Austin, where immortals like Earl Campbell and Ricky Williams once did their work.

Junior running back Vondrell McGee knows that this season the running back corps will have to make considerable strides to quiet detractors who insist the Longhorns ground attack has fallen off.

Could the NBA and its minimum age requirement really be guilty of hypocrisy?

It certainly appears that way to Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel and some other Big 12 coaches after watching the most recent NBA Finals and seeing which NBA players were pushed as the faces of the league throughout the season.

The straight out of high school players, who are the type of players the NBA no longer wants to be associated with, are now carrying the torch for the world's best pro game.

"If you follow the NBA, if you look at the guys who are promoted as the face of the NBA, you are talking about Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett," Capel said. "Those are four that jumped right out and none of those guys attended college and I don't think it hurt them."

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If the complete strangeness of what was going on in the Kansas State athletic department while Bob Krause was running things was going on at any other program, you would have to think it would be bigger news. Yet it barely seems to make a ripple in college sports.

First it was learned that Krause gave former head coach Ron Prince a "secret" side deal the summer before Prince's firing. Now it turns out that Krause also rewarded his deputy athletic director, Jim Epps, with a long-term contract, complete with a buy-out clause if he were to be fired.

Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer says he's moved on. He doesn't dwell on his decision that stunned Sooner nation and crippled the football program 20 years ago Thursday when he suddenly resigned.

OU was in a heap of trouble back then, with five players being arrested on various felony charges and the program had been slapped with three years of NCAA probation for recruiting violations. Who could forget a tearful Switzer admitting on June 19, 1989, that too much had transpired for him to continue on as the Sooners coach?

The debate about which conference is the best basketball league usually heats up in December.

But the Big 12 coaches set fire to the debate early by staking claim as the best basketball conference Tuesday, some five months before the 2009-10 season begins. So the Big East, ACC, Pac-10 and SEC will have to just lineup for second best.

"I do think it's going to be the best with what we have retuning and the things that we've done in the last few years," Texas A&M coach Mark Turgeon said during the Big 12 summer teleconference call Tuesday. "I've talked to some so-called experts out there and they think we are going to be the best league, too.

The deadline for underclassmen to withdraw from the NBA draft came and went Monday at 5PM. Plenty of underclassmen had already made decisions to not even test the waters (Willie Warren, Oklahoma) or previously decided to return (Patrick Patterson, Kentucky). Still, plenty of others never looked back by hiring an agent right away (Earl Clark, Louisville).

The focus is strictly on the players that took it up until this weekend or even right under the wire Monday afternoon. Before getting to the programs that "won" and "lost" with the decisions to stay or go there are two teams that have counter-intuitive situations.

While some athletic departments in the Big 12 and across the country are having to scale back in the wake of the recession, the University of Texas athletic department continues to rake in the big bucks.

According to a report in the Birmingham Business Journal on Monday, the Longhorns rank No.1 in football revenue and overall revenue based on 2007-08 numbers. Texas generated $72.95 million in football revenue and $120.28 million overall.

Ohio State came in second in overall revenue with $117.95 million, followed by Florida with $106.03 million.

Apparently, athletic departments aren't immune to the whims of the stock market.

Both Oklahoma State and Texas A&M are feeling the crunch, according to a couple stories this week.

Oklahoma State had to drastically reduce plans for a state-of-the-art Athletic Village it was planning after a facilities fund being managed by the T. Boone Pickens BP Capital Investment Fund lost $282 million during the last year, leaving just $125 million in the fund, according to story in the Tulsa World.