Twelve years after the studio lights flickered on, the network will soon go dark: LHN will be folded into the SEC Network when Texas joins the Southeastern Conference next summer. This academic year is the last for a pioneering effort that forced new NCAA rules, laid the groundwork for emerging conference networks and played a role in what would be a decade of realignment.
The network as originally envisioned was a good idea: a channel for sports across the state. We would collaborate with A&M to show college sports and leverage the fact that UIL is administered by UT to get high school football (bigger than CFB in many areas) on TV. But fear, pride, and an inflated amount of money from ESPN resulted in the watered down version that was only really good at streaming Bevo on Christmas.
So I’m glad this is the last year of LHN. I couldn’t stand how people pointed to it as the reason the Big XII fragmented (as the article mentions, realignment was already underway).
That would have been cool if it worked ended up showing college and high school sports from schools across Texas. I had not heard of this before. Shame that it ended up the way it did.
