Tom Hansen, out-going Pac-10 Commissioner and talks about his time with the Pac-10

Q. In 1990, Arkansas jumped from the Southwest Conference to the SEC. That same year the ACC expanded and the Pac-10 took a look at adding Texas and Texas A&M. How close did the Texas schools come to joining the Pac-10?

A. It's been a long time and memories do tricks to you but Texas was in my opinion based on communications, Texas was very interested and it thought initially might be able to come alone. Then about the time things were really getting serious it was made clear to us by Texas-Austin that it couldn't get clear of A&M. We invited A&M but before we got a clear signal from A&M, Ann Richards who was then the governor said Baylor's my alma mater and they're going wherever Texas and Texas A&M go and then in a less clear message, but still pretty well defined, we were told the legislators who control the oil money that goes to the Texas universities was controlled either by alumni of or representatives of the area of Texas Tech and now there was a group of four and we were not interested in going from 10 to 14 so we said 'thank you anyway.' But Texas alone was very favorably inclined to consider our offer.

Q. Do you see any chance of the league expanding in the future?

A. I don't think so at this particular time because the reason you expand in college is to expand your football television footprint and so none of the colleges within our footprint helps and the only ones fairly close by that would extend it at all would be Brigham Young and Utah. And they only have about 0.8 percent of the nation's TV homes. Since you divide out our 18 plus percent by 10 you'd want some institution worth 1.8 percent or more. That would not be of interest. We'd be feeding more mouths with less money. So the only institution that's ever much made sense from that standpoint is Texas because back then they had 7 percent of the TV market.