For the time being, Oklahoma State will not opt in to the credit line through the Big 12’s recent deal with RedBird.

In case you missed it last week, the Big 12 approved a five-year agreement with RedBird Capital Partners, becoming the first conference to have a league-wide, private capital deal.

The deal provides the Big 12 with a $12.5 million capital infusion while the league’s institutions have the opportunity to opt into a $30 million credit line that would have to be paid back with a “double-digit” interest rate, according to ESPN.

It doesn’t sound like many (if any) schools will take RedBird up on that deal, and that includes Oklahoma State. OSU athletic director Chad Weiberg spoke with Dave Hunziker in a podcast that released Friday, where Weiberg cleared things up from the OSU side of things.

“First of all, I give commissioner (Brett) Yormark a lot of credit for providing opportunities to the schools to look at,” Weiberg said. “He is an innovator. He pushes the envelope. He’s not afraid of trying new things to better the conference and all the member institutions. So, I think there’s a little bit of a misconception on this. This isn’t a private equity deal. There’s no ownership stake or control in the conference they’re taking. It’s more of a private investment opportunity. RedBird is a huge global entity. They’ve got a lot of partnerships. The conference office will get out of it some money to be able to invest in some other business entities, take an investment in those to try to grow revenues from a different revenue stream. I think that’s something that’s worth exploring in this time that we’re in. And then the schools have the option to opt into a line of credit through that, and that’s up to each institution. It doesn’t effect the deal with the conference itself.

“As of right now, that is something that Oklahoma State will not do at this point. Should we need something like that, we believe we have other avenues or levers we could pull first before that. But again, I applaud the commissioner for making those options available to us.”

Weiberg and Hunziker also got into some other financial matters, like the report last week that the Big Ten distributed a record $1.37 billion to its 18 members in the 2024-25 fiscal year — a jump of about $500 million. The SEC announced in February that it had distributed more than $1 billion to its 16 members for the fiscal year.

So, dividing that up, that’s about $76 million on average for each Big Ten school and about $62.5 million for each SEC school.

The Big 12 hasn’t announced its allocations yet, but Weiberg said he expects the average Big 12 distribution to come in “north of $35 million.”

“That’s a wide discrepancy,” Weiberg said. “It’s a wider discrepancy than we’ve ever seen in the history of college athletics.”

To try to level that playing field as much as possible, Weiberg said OSU has asked all of its programs to cut expenses by 10%, OSU has increased ticket prices and the Boys From Oklahoma concerts have also helped with that.

It’s an uphill battle, but Weiberg noted that OSU has had to compete with the likes of Texas, one of the highest-funded athletic departments in the country, for years.

“There’s a bigger discrepancy now between what some conferences are getting and what others are than there ever has been before,” Weiberg said. “So, that presents unique challenges in terms of just the level playing field. At the end of the day, when you’re in a competition, part of what makes the competition interesting is when you’re trying to compete on a level playing field. Now, I say that acknowledging that there’s never an exactly level playing field — I don’t care if its the NFL or Major League Baseball or whatever, there’s not that. But I think to keep it interesting, there needs to be some version of a level playing field, and that’s getting very tilted in this environment.

“We’ve competed before. We’ve never been the highest-resourced institution in our conference or in the country or anything like that, and we’ve competed at a very high level in all of our sports, from football through all the other sports. Obviously the 55 national championships are a great indicator of that.”

South Carolina Republicans took the first step Friday to cancel the state’s June primary election — to give more time to potentially pass a new gerrymandered congressional map  — as absentee voting is already underway. 

A South Carolina House subcommittee voted 3-2 along party lines to advance a bill that would move the state’s June 9 primary election to August 11, with the expectation that the legislature would redraw the state’s congressional map to dismantle its lone Democratic district, represented by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn. 

The vote came after the committee heard hours of public testimony urging lawmakers to reject pressure to delay the state’s primaries and draw new congressional maps. In all, 23 South Carolina residents testified against redistricting and moving the state’s primaries. No one spoke in support of either measure. 

More than 6,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to military and overseas voters for the June primary — more than 200 of those ballots have since been returned, according to the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC). Should the legislature approve the measure to delay the state’s primary, those ballots will be disqualified. 

Conway Belangia, the executive director of the SCEC, said at Friday’s hearing that moving the primary to August “will be difficult… but it is possible.” 

The difficulty, he outlined, is the massive amount it will cost taxpayers to toss out the ballots that have already been printed and sent to voters: Approximately $2.5 million. 

“That’s being done not for the benefit of all the citizens of this state, but for the benefit of one party,” Rep. Justin Bamberg (D) noted. 

Delaying the primary election would be done to accommodate a redistricting process moving so fast that even some state Republicans want to slow down. 

Earlier this week, Republicans in the South Carolina House approved a sine die amendment allowing lawmakers to return after adjournment to take up congressional redistricting — joining a cluster of Southern states rushing to redraw maps after the Supreme Court gutted key Voting Rights Act protections that had long shielded Black voting power from racial gerrymandering. 

But the state Senate, who convened yesterday and were expected to vote on the sine die amendment, did not take up the measure. Instead, the Senate pushed the vote to next week after some senators said they wanted to see what the new congressional map would look like. 

The map, presented during Friday’s House judiciary subcommittee hearing, would carve up Clyburn’s district, which sits in the South and Eastern part of the state and includes much of the majority-Black areas around the cities Charleston and Columbia. Instead, Charleston would be divided up into two districts — districts 1 and 7, the latter of which stretches more than 100 miles from Charleston. And Richland County, which contains the state’s capital city of Columbia, would be chopped up into three different districts. 

Dozens of residents testified in opposition to the map and bill to move the state’s primaries during the public comment portion of Friday’s hearing, including former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison.

Of the proposed map, Harrison said “Richland County looks like a political jigsaw puzzle.”

For hours, South Carolina residents, one after the other, stepped up to the podium to address the House subcommittee. 

James Starnes, the president of a neighborhood association in Clyburn’s district, called the new map a “DEI map.”

“I’m looking at a map that says we’re not going to worry about qualifications, but we’re going to make sure that everybody is a Republican,” Starnes said. “That’s DEI, as defined by the Republican Party… This is the DEI map in my estimation.”

Chris Hemsall, a retired army colonel who also lives in Clyburn’s district, said he was “probably the most conservative person in this room,” and spoke out in opposition to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts. 

“Who thinks gerrymandering is good for democracy?” he asked the lawmakers. “Who thinks gerrymandering makes for a more perfect union? Who thinks gerrymandering establishes justice? Nobody. We all know gerrymandering is wrong, so why are we doing it?”