ESPN College Football

Posted by ESPN.com's Tim Griffin

The Eyes of Texas might be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week sooner than we think.

Business Week is reporting that the University of Texas is in serious negotiation with the college sports unit of IMG International to discuss distribution of the proposed Longhorn Cable Channel on Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and AT&T in Texas and possibly in bordering states.

If the channel comes to fruition, it would be the first for any college university.

"Texas has such an incredible fan base and such great content through all its sports programs," IMG's Pat Battle told the Business Week's Tom Lowry, "that we feel a network like this will have a real following."

The proposed network would have a range of sports from baseball to track and field but doesn't have specific game rights to the Longhorns' enormously popular football games. That lack of programming has raised doubts about what kind of an audience the network could realistically attract. But the school is in negotiation with Fox about buying back the rights to some games that would serve as the programming backbone for the network.

Texas already has the largest university sports budget in the nation at $120 million. Could the school add to those revenues by breaking out on its own with its own network?

"I don't know how far down the tree you can take this thing," Mike Trager, founder of TV sports consultancy The Trager Group, told Business Week. "The revenue pie for college sports stays essentially the same, but they keep slicing it up. The question for Texas is, 'Can you get the revenue and distribution for that specific of a niche?'"

Maybe so. But many people doubted the viability of cable television networks that dealt exclusively with food, weather and travel.

And in the Lone Star State, Longhorn sports certainly ranks higher than any of that.

Here are some of the other stories that people are talking about this morning around the Big 12.

• The Austin American-Statesman's Kirk Bohls writes in his 10 weekly observations that Texas Tech deserves to be the No. 1 team in the country and that he would hire former Iowa State coach Dan McCarney "in an instant" to be Kansas State's new coach.
• Alabama and Texas Tech have the inside track to spots in the BCS Championship Game Jan. 8 in Miami, but don't rule out Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, according to the Dallas Morning News' Chuck Carlton.
• Notice the smell at Kyle Field? It's not the struggling Texas A&M football team. The stadium has become a haven for Mexican free-tailed bats who flock there have coated it with guano, Cassie Smith of the Bryan Eagle writes.
• Blair Kerkhoff of the Kansas City Star writes about how rare it is to see empty seats at the top of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium like it was Saturday when the Cornhuskers beat Kansas. And the Lincoln Journal-Star's Brent C. Wagner opines about how fans are spreading out at the top reaches of the mammoth stadium.
• The Fort Worth Star Telegram's Jimmy Burch writes about how the road to the BCS championship runs through the Big 12.
• The Tulsa World's John Klein writes that Oklahoma has the most potential for BCS movement during the rest of the season with huge games approaching against Texas Tech and Oklahoma State.