The meaning of Dan Beebe stepping down as Big 12 commissioner (plus the Real Dan Beebe encountering the Fake Dan Beebe)
The Kansas City Star
I wrote Wednesday that Dan Beebe had to go from the Big 12, so the news that he’s working on doing that is a welcome sight here.
Beebe was not up to the task, simple. The conference he oversees lost a quarter of its members — including two pillars — within about 15 months. Here’s the sweet spot of yesterday’s column:
There is no alternative here, not when people who are supposed to respect you are so blatantly insolent, and not when entities you’re supposed to manage are so brazenly dismissive.
That’s why he had to go, but history will — channeling my inner-Roger Clemens here — misremember Beebe as a stooge, and that’s too bad. He did a lot of good things^, worked hard, but came up against an unmanageable situation.
^ My favorite Dan Beebe moment has nothing to do with his leadership or his failures or his successes. It has to do with sitting next to him at the Final Four this past year in Houston, and him asking me to pull up Twitter to look at the timeline of Fake Dan Beebe. “That guy’s funny,” the real Dan Beebe said.
Beebe didn’t overcome the unique obstacles of being commissioner in a league built on shotgun wedding vows and financial convenience and distrust, and that’s on his permanent record, the first line of his obit, but there should also be some consideration that he dealt with factors no other conference commish in the country experienced.
I’m not saying Beebe is a brilliant leader of men, I’m just saying that in the context he was given, trying to slap Texas into equal revenue sharing was about as easy as a fat man with pit stains getting a date with Kate Upton.
The productive part of Beebe stepping down is that hopefully it’s a mile-marker of sorts for Texas to make some much-needed concessions that would still retain UT’s power but also allow the other schools the breathe a little easier.
In other words, the hope is that by doing this, the next commissioner will have a better chance to succeed than Beebe.
Larry Scofield
1 year, 8 months ago“The meaning of Dan Beebe stepping down…”
Wow, Mellinger, what insight. It means he’s leaving because he didn’t do a good enough job and people want him gone.
It’s not that you don’t know how to write; it’s that you rarely have anything to say. This piece is not the worst I’ve ever read, but it’s among them.