@tubertigertank, and thank you for explaining your very entertaining alias. Every man goes through a tube phase. Bully for you for shrinking yours! You probably can’t get any sleep at all because of how handsome you are to your beloved.
And I respect you so much for getting your daughter through school and into the State Dept. She must lead a fascinating life serving our country. It is an awesomely positive reflection on the work you put in for her.
The situation with the AD and the TV contract is frustrating. The only justification for it is that KU probably has some regulatory obligations to the minor sports that included getting them some broadcast time. Paying cash to broadcast them might have been prohibitively expensive. Also, Zenger perhaps felt the need to pinch pennies after KU had to go to the alumni trough to shed Gill, then hire Weis, then raise cash to renovate the football stadium AND build the new apartment building for the athletes. It could have been as simple as he just did not want to go to the alumni AGAIN with so many other bigger projects requiring bigger funding and donations. Zenger has spent big to restructure Self’s contract again, too. So maybe Sheahon had to look for a way to meet the possible regulatory obligation to the minor sports that did not mean shelling out a bunch of cash. He looked around the shelf and knew he couldn’t get anything in trade for KU football, and the only thing he had to trade was some KU broadcasts. Maybe he figured people would stream the blacked out basketball games online.
But if Zenger did it just to cut a corner, when he didn’t need to, well, then IMHO he made a bad choice. There are other ways to grow the minor sports. Go to the alumni of the minor sports and get them to make contributions.
Hard to say until more scoop on cui bono surfaces, I reckon.