Welcome into Outkick the Show. I am your fearless leader Clay Travis. I hope all of you are having fantastic Wednesdays, wherever you may be across this great country or this great land. We have got a lot to dive into today.

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But I didn't talk about this story yesterday and I realized that I wanted to because I wrote an article yesterday and then the new cycle kind of got out of control.

But what people have said, how did Texas and Oklahoma end up basically in the SEC? A couple different things.

I am told SEC commissioner Greg Sanky never called Texas and Oklahoma. They drove the entire bus for wanting to leave the big 12. They reached out to the SEC directly.

And this is a good back story. And if you like contracts, it's a fun, maybe a law review article for somebody out there who is in law school right now, or if you're just taking a sports law course or a sports business course, we're going to take you back in time a little bit.

In 2011, the SEC expanded and added Texas A&M and Missouri to go from 12 teams to 14 teams. And when they did that CBS who has the SEC game of the week refused to increase the amount that they were paying for the SEC game of the week on a pro-rated basis.

That so infuriated Mike Slyve and the rest of the SEC that it ultimately led to what happened in December of 2019 when the SEC decided that they were going to pull their game away from CBS and go to ESPN slash ABC instead and put all SEC games under the ESPN family of networks.

As they were finalizing that deal in December of 2019, there was a discussion about how to reconcile that issue that arose a decade ago now when Missouri and Texas A&M came into the conference.

In particular, what do we do if expansion becomes possible again and we want to add teams to our list of available expansion options?

They said, hey, we need to figure out what an A-list category is so we can balance ESPN's needs and the SEC's needs and so this doesn't turn into a battle in the years ahead where we take less money in order to expand or the network refuses to give us more money in the event that we add more teams.

And so they debated defining an A-list team as Texas but they thought that if they said Texas that would limit it USC, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, just a smaller subset would be included if Texas was an A-list team.

So they actually used Oklahoma in an effort to define what an A-list team was because they thought it gave more flexibility to the SEC in the event that they expand.

And now that is a masterstroke of Greg Sanky. Keep in mind Sanky cares deeply about the legacy of the SEC.

He did an incredible job having the season played last year after the Big Ten and the Pack 12 tried to cancel the year but also look at the history.

The SEC has driven the future of college football. Roy Kramer added the SEC championship game and every conference since has added their own conference championship game.

So that was all the way back in 1992. And then Mike Slide came in, took over the league and added Texas A&M and Missouri and took the SEC to Texas.

And now Greg Sanky is adding two of the best brands in all of college football, Texas and Oklahoma and taking the SEC to 16 and cementing his status as one of the greatest commissioners I believe of all time.

And not only finding a way to play last football season but also finding his way to actually be able to expand.

And so that contractual part of the deal between the SEC and ESPN which no one else has talked about or reported is what paved the way for Texas and Oklahoma to make the move to the SEC.

Alright, what happens next? I'm about to write the Big Ten column and you guys will be able to go read that later today.

But in the short term, I wanted to discuss what I think the Big Ten is considering.

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