POLITICAL FOOTBALL
Big 12 nearly passed on UH again until super-backer Tilman Fertitta closed deal
This was personal for Tilman Fertitta.
This was pride.
This was business.
And let’s get the big word that really matters out of the way right now: legacy.
This was legacy.
“It’s no different than when you’re losing a deal,” Fertitta said Friday evening after closing one of the biggest and most rewarding negotiations of his life. “You’ve been working on a deal and you’re losing it. And you start doing whatever you can to put the genie back in the bottle. It was totally a business instinct.”
The University of Houston isn’t in the Big 12 without a final goal-line push from its billionaire backer.
Let’s also make this clear right now. There was a time in college sports history when the shrinking Big 12 had decided to expand with three new additions — BYU, UCF, Cincinnati — and the UH Cougars were officially being overlooked again, in the most painful way possible.
That time wasn’t in 2016, when the Big 12 coldly said no to the Coogs.
That time was two weeks ago.
The Big 12 was moving on and ensuring that it would stay in the Power Five game without SEC-bound Texas and Oklahoma.
UH was still stuck in the American Athletic Conference, missing out on the second major wave of conference realignment in the last decade.
“If you let in three teams, then why in the hell aren’t you going to let in four?” said Fertitta, with frustration still saturating his words.
The simple math, from UH’s perspective, kicked off a 72-hour storm that suddenly turned Fertitta into the Cougars’ best and last hope, and potentially changed the future of UH’s athletics program for decades to come.
From out to in.
From the Southwest Conference and Conference USA and the AAC to the long-desired Big 12, with regional rivalries renewed and UH trading its worn-out stepping stone for a new bridge.
“It took some heavy lifting at the end — and at the beginning,” said Fertitta, a restaurant/hotel/casino owner who bought the
NBA’s Rockets for $2.2 billion in 2017 and serves as the chairman of UH’s board of regents.
Cougars athletic director Chris Pezman leaned against a wall inside the Alumni Center on Friday afternoon after eagerly answering another round of Big 12 questions.
The Cougars’ big leap, finally.
UH in a Power Five conference, finally.
Increased national exposure and local recognition. Improved recruiting. And money. Lots and lots of college-football driven, TV-contract fueled money.
Pezman’s eyes glowed with pride as he kept discussing everything UH and
Big 12. But he also seemed tired. The last couple weeks had been filled with professional anxiety. At one critical point, the Coogs were being overlooked again and it felt like UH had exhausted its options.
Pezman was asked one more question.
Is UH in the Big 12 without Fertitta?
“The short answer is no. No,” said Pezman, dragging out the last word for emphasis.
Then the AD recalled a mission-critical moment when UH’s athletic future was on the line and there was only one person who possessed the power to turn bad news into good news.
“Toward the end, when it felt like we needed to fire bullets politically, that’s the guy (Fertitta) that’s got — he had our back,” Pezman said. “A couple weeks ago, I wasn’t sure it was going our way. I called (Fertitta) at like 9 o’clock on a Sunday night and it was a moment of
abject terror because I’m like, ‘We’ve fired a lot of bullets.’ The next morning, he was grinding through it.
“There was a couple really high political people in the state, that you can imagine, and he just made it happen. He was very clear about how it would affect him and his perceived leadership of the university. … It certainly didn’t hurt having a guy like him that can make those phone calls and be able to get those calls answered. I can’t.”
There was a program-altering Peach Bowl victory in 2015 and a near-perfect 13-1 campaign during Tom Herman’s first season coaching the football Cougars.
Kelvin Sampson kept annually lifting his basketball Coogs upward, after rebuilding them, and faced eventual national champion Baylor in the Final Four in April in Indianapolis.
UH chancellor Renu Khator obviously deserves credit for the school’s academic and on-campus improvements. Former ADs Mack Rhoades and Hunter Yurachek helped point UH forward.
Fans spent decades believing in, standing up for and financially aiding the Coogs, who have gotten the best out of the Group of Five AAC since 2013.
But in the end, 26 years spent searching for a new conference home that truly meant something came down to what big-time college sports always come down to.
Power and politics. UH had to find a way to force its way back into the big game.
“I feel like I’ve lived a pretty good life and I usually win, OK?” Fertitta said. “You can’t go ‘win’ an NBA championship. It takes luck. If it didn’t take luck, we would have won a championship in my first year with Chris Paul not getting hurt.
“But this was a case where if they can pick anybody, that’s fine. But you can’t go pick those three schools and not us. And that was it. And that was my position and it was Chris’ (Pezman) position and it was Renu’s position.”
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Friday that the University of Houston has “come a long, long way” under Khator’s leadership and acknowledged that it’s impossible to live in the state of Texas without noticing all the modern changes at UH.
Before saying that, Bowlsby
praised Fertitta for being “successful in everything that he’s done.”
“That is probably why the chancellor (Khator) enjoys working with (Fertitta) so much, because he recognizes excellence and he deploys the necessary resources against the challenge to make that a reality,” Bowlsby said. “That’s a special circumstance when you have that sort of partnership.”
Construction continued on Cullen Boulevard on Friday as the fourth-largest city in America entered another summer weekend.
A new professional relationship was proudly displayed on a nearby Jumbotron that highlighted a baseball field: UH/XII.
Down the street from all the piled-up dirt and paused excavators, FERTITTA CENTER boldly stood out in all-caps red on the side of a remodeled arena that doubles as one of the best homecourt advantages in college basketball.
The Big 12 was going to say no to UH, again.
Then UH was finally in. This was personal for Fertitta. Because this was business.
This was his legacy.
“If it would not have happened on my watch this time, I would not be chairman of the Board of Regents as of (Friday), OK?” Fertitta said. “I would have been a failure and I could not have dealt with it.”