Book tells different story on SEC shift
COLLEGE STATION — Ten years ago Wednesday, thenTexas A&M regents chair Richard Box called the group together for a closeddoor discussion on the Aggies perhaps exiting the Big 12.
Box insisted that then-A&M athletic director Bill Byrne and then-school president R. Bowen Loftin be in attendance. Loftin showed up. Byrne did not.
“Where the hell is Byrne?” Box asked Loftin, according to an upcoming book titled “Breaking Away: How the Texas A&M System Changed the Game” by Tim Gregg.
It turns out Byrne was on a fishing trip to Alaska that included then-Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott. Loftin, tasked with conveying the importance of the meeting to Byrne, told Box that Byrne intended to join the meeting via conference call. An angry Box believed both men had committed insubordination with Byrne’s absence.
“I wanted to fire both of them on the spot,” Box recalled in the book.
Loftin, who was the face of A&M’s exit of the Big 12 and eventual entrance to the SEC, is widely credited with being the catalyst of the move. Box, who served as A&M regents chair from 2011-13, takes exception to Loftin’s celebrated role in the new book.
According to “Breaking Away,” Byrne’s absence “suggested one of two things to Box: The importance of the executive session had not been appropriately communicated to Byrne, or the university president and his athletic director had plans they were not yet sharing with others.”
Byrne this week disputed that account and said Scott was a late invite (via others) to the Alaska fishing trip that included former NCAA president Cedric Dempsey and a handful of their
offspring.
“I was deliberately excluded from any of the decision-making that went on,” Byrne said of A&M mulling its conference options a decade ago. “President Loftin was very upfront that this was his program and he was going to make the decisions. I was asked to provide an analysis of the various conferences that might be possibilities — the Big Ten, the SEC and the Pac-12 — but before I could even turn it in, the decision had already been made that we were going to the SEC.”
As for Box’s demand of Byrne’s attendance at the regents meeting on July 21, 2011?
“I was never invited,” Byrne said. “I was not part of the decision-making process.”
Loftin stepped out of the tide-turning meeting that afternoon a decade ago and declared the Big 12 in a state of “uncertainty,” primarily because the University of Texas was launching the Longhorn Network later that summer through a $300 million deal with ESPN.
Two months later, A&M officially announced it was exiting the Big 12 and joining the SEC. Byrne retired as A&M athletic director in May 2012, a little more than a month before the Aggies officially joined the SEC.
To his credit, Loftin, who stepped down as A&M president in January 2014, in a recent visit with the Chronicle described A&M’s decision in 2011 to leave the Big 12 and join the SEC in the summer of 2012 as a true “team effort.”
“Richard Box, Jim Schwertner, Gene Stallings, those guys were very, very supportive and focused on this move,” said Loftin, who especially thanked then-regent Jim Wilson for his help along the way.
Box was regents chair, and Schwertner and Stallings, the former A&M player and coach and ex-Alabama coach, were A&M regents at the time. The new book, which has the backing of A&M chancellor John Sharp, refers to Stallings as “the single most influential figure in steering Texas A&M toward membership in the SEC.”
“Breaking Away” also contends then-UT president Bill Powers had “made a convincing case to … Loftin that the Pac-(12) was a better fit for their schools, both academically and athletically.”
Then-regent Phil Adams said in the book, “Coach Stallings was dead set against going to the Pac-(12). He thought that was a terrible idea, and in time, most of us on the board of regents agreed with him.”
Added Adams: “We had nothing in common with the schools out west. … (And) the thought of the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band playing at halftime of a game in Berkeley, Calif., was something we just couldn’t imagine ever happening.”
All along, Loftin, an immensely popular A&M president with students and former students at the time, has said he carefully considered all of the Aggies’ options starting in 2010 — including the Pac-12 or perhaps staying in the Big 12 — before deciding the SEC was the best option moving forward.
Gregg wrote in the new account disputing Loftin’s vital role, “In his book, ‘The 100-Year Decision: Texas A&M and the SEC’ Bowen Loftin says he made the case for the SEC at the closed-door session — a claim that Chairman Box disputes.”
In any case and no matter the primary catalysts, A&M’s nearly decade-old move to the SEC has proved fruitful, despite no football titles in that span. For instance, in 2018-19 and before the COVID-19 pandemic, the SEC’s annual payout to its 14 members was $44.6 million.
By comparison, in the same fiscal year the Big 12 was at $38.8 million each to its 10 members.
“We had been informally discussing conference affiliation for some time,” Adams said in the book. “Things in the Big 12 were a mess. We weren’t sure the league would last, and we needed to consider other options.
“Before he left the board (in 2011), Coach Stallings had made it clear where he thought we needed to be.”