So, to the surprise of absolutely no one, it would appear that Dan Beebe’s reign as head of the Big 12 will come to an end Thursday.
Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com is reporting that Beebe will receive his walking papers Thursday. College football consultant extraordinaire Chuck Neinas will be brought in as Beebster’s replacement on an interim basis, per Dodd, although his interim term may very well outlast the league he’s going to be running.
Why Neinas? I have no idea, although I imagine his ties to the old Big 8 – he served as that league’s commish in the 1970s – probably appealed to the conference’s original members. That would include current squeaky wheel Oklahoma. Additionally, Neinas counts Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds and Kirby Hocutt, Texas Tech’s A.D., among his former employees, along with BCS executive director Bill Hancock.
It’s all so incestuous.
Anyway, I have another, more important, question: Why would Neinas leave his gig as a professional rainmaker to run a league where everyone lives to screw everyone else over? I mean, think about what his job entails now – a few phone calls, maybe even some e-mails; light filing; “facilitating” interviews on the clients’ dime.
Um, I realize he’s no spring chicken, but he has to at least know someone who knows how to use the Internet and can show him what has been going down in this conference the last few weeks, right?
Assuming Neinas doesn’t come to his senses and does take the job, his first order of business should be to convince the rest of the schools in the Big 12 to actually let him be a commissioner. While Beebe did little to demonstrate he should head a major college conference, the truth is that the Big 12 schools essentially set him up with limited authority from the jump.
With so much hostility and infighting currently plaguing the conference, the Big 12 needs a decisive authority figure to settle disputes and give the league at least a measure of stability. Given that probably half of the guys who are voting to hire Neinas have some kind of personal relationship with him, maybe he will turn out to be the consensus-builder the Big 12 needs.
(And if you buy that…)
