Texas House Leaders Throw Up Temporary Roadblock with Hearing Set on Big 12 Crisis
June 12, 210
By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor
DALLAS - More than a dozen state lawmakers with degrees from Baylor University won a critical reprieve late Friday when a Texas House committee set a hearing for next week in a move that could put the brakes temporarily on plans by the University of Texas to defect from the Big 12 to the PAC-10.
The House Higher Education Committee - with the blessings of Republican Speaker Joe Straus - scheduled a meeting for 10 a.m. Wednesday at the state Capitol in Austin for the purpose of discussing "matters pertaining to higher education, including collegiate athletics."
The hearing, which will be limited to testimony from witnesses who are invited by the committee to appear, is a potentially critical development in a race against the clock by Baylor supporters in the Legislature and the lobby who've been working furiously for the past week to prevent UT from joining another athletic conference unless BU was allowed to make the same move.
News reports throughout the day indicated that UT, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State had made the decision to leave the Big 12 so they could become part of an expanded PAC-10 that wouldn't include the private Baptist institution in Waco. Texas A&M had been expected to be part of the package as well before it began to waver amid the possibility of an invitation to the Southeast Conference where officials there would prefer to go if the Big 12 falls apart.
But U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards of Waco and the city's two House members, Waco State Reps.Charles "Doc" Anderson andJim Dunnam, joined the Baylor graduates who are legislators in requests late this week for a legislative hearing in hopes of delaying the Big 12's demise or heading it off completely. The decision by House leaders to grant the hearing before the PAC-10 expansion deal was formally sealed is crucial in the push to keep UT from severing its ties with BU because buys time that appeared to have all but expired.
The Higher Education Committee is chaired by State Rep. Dan Branch, a Dallas Republican and top Straus lieutenant to whom the Baylor alumni in the lower chamber pleaded for help in a last-ditch move to preserve the alliance between the private school and the state's largest public university or at least guarantee BU a spot in a package shift by Texas to another conference.
Several of the legislators who are Baylor graduates including State Reps. Ken Paxton of McKinney and Bryan Hughes of Mineola were huddling in Dallas where they were attending the state Republican Convention and making calls on their cell phones from the floor of the event and the halls surrounding it in the desperation effort involving the Big 12's potential breakup and making calls regarding it while attending the state Republican Convention in Dallas.
Paxton and Hughes contacted Straus and Branch to press for the hearing - and Hughes left a message Friday night on the answering machine for UT President Bill Powers to notify him about the committee meeting next week and the need for Texas to hold off on a final decision concerning its status as a Big 12 member. Powers and other UT officials have taken the position that Texas has been doing everything it could to keep the Big 12 from splitting up but that it doesn't have as much sway as the Baylor supporters contend.
But Baylor's backers at the statehouse have been skeptical of that assertion. Dunnam argued in an editorial opinion piece on Thursday that any decisions involving the schools in the Big 12 that receive taxpayer money should be made in public. While Nebraska and Colorado announced plans late this week to leave the Big 12 in two years for the Big 10 and PAC-10 respectively, some of the Baylor graduates in the state House have suggested that UT is intoxicated with greed and would be making a foolish move to switch to the PAC-10,
The legislators who've been involved in the push to keep the rivalry between UT and Baylor intact say that the issue is important because high-stakes questions pertaining to economic development and the use of taxpayer money are at stake.
While Dunnam, a Democrat, received undergraduate and law degrees from Baylor, Anderson and Edwards are both Texas A&M graduates. Anderson is a Republican while Edwards is a Democrat. Branch attended SMU while Straus went to college out of state at Vanderbilt.
The decision to allow the hearing came a day after Governor Rick Perry said that he had no plans to intervene in the sports league crisis because he felt the individual schools that would be affected should make the decision on what would be in their own best interests. Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst has stayed out of the fray as well.