The Texas Christian Horned Frogs, currently No. 3 in the BCS, are leaving the Mountain West Conference to join the Big East in 2012-13.

I don’t know about you, but I would have liked to see the Big 12 at least try to make a play for the Ft. Worth, Texas, school. But that’s apparently not according to conference commissioner Dan Beebe’s “master plan.”

You see, Beebe was the man who held the Big 12 together amid crazy realignment scenarios. Why? Well, we know now that part of his reasoning was so Texas could screw over the rest of the remaining nine members to make its own TV network — the Longhorn Network.

With the network, Texas will be making close to $20 million alone. Good for Texas, but how does that benefit the rest of the conference? Short answer: It doesn’t. At all.

Beebe did what he felt necessary to keep the Big 12 from crumbling. That something turned out to be giving Texas the keys to the conference and the power to do what it wants with them. Sure sounds like a winning deal for everyone else, including the Sooners.

The TCU situation only makes all of this worse. It’s bad enough that the premiere teams in the conference didn’t make the jump into relevancy by joining mega-conferences because Beebe promised Texas riches. But now the most logical new member for a reformed Big 12 has gone elsewhere.

So Beebe, you’re telling me in a world where the Pac-12, the 12-member Big Ten, the ACC and the SEC all have conference championships and enough members, the 10-member Big 12 will still be relevant? Think again. Think Big East pre-TCU.

No conference championship? No high-dollar TV network deal? Sounds to me like the Big 12’s being left in the dust. Roping TCU into the fold could have been the first major step to restoring the conference to prevalence in college football. But now that first step is gone, and we can only trust that Beebe knows what he’s doing.

As far as I can tell, Beebe didn’t even make a play for TCU at all. Does he even care about the conference he’s leading to death at an ever-increasing pace?

I guess this means Nebraska was right — a conference solely revolving around the money-hungry, selfish Longhorns will benefit no one but the Longhorns. Nebraska and Colorado will laugh all the way to the bank in their new conferences as the Texas-Beebe tandem runs the Big 12 into the ground getting the Longhorns rich.

The Sooners should have left for the Pac-10 or the SEC when they had the chance instead of getting stuck in this sinking ship that is a 10-member Big 12.