I agree. I do not see this as a successful network. It has every chance at being virtually "stillborn", and gone within a year.
Programming: You covered it. A couple of football games, really its two worst games. Big deal. Non-conference basketball. Big deal. And "olympic sports" and baseball. And what. This is about 40 hours of worthwhile programming crammed into 8736 hours.
Carriage: They want a whopping 40 cents per subscriber in Texas. And, shockingly in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico. And an unknown amount elsewhere. Lets think about that. A general rerun based channel like TBS or USA gets maybe 5 cents, and lesser channels are often a part of a package and might get 5 cents for the whole package. 40 cents? And they want to be in either the "basic" package (the standard minimum package everyone gets) or, as a fallback in the "sports tier" (in a mix with the likes of the extra ESPN varriants, NFLN, etc). Believe it or not, there are millions of people in Texas who fall into the following groups: don't follow sports; don't follow college sports; don't follow UT; and lastly and most importantly, might loosly follow UT but are not willing (or able) to pay that much for this little content and are content to listen to a football game or two on the radio, or to head to BW3.
They have to convince an entire state's set of cable operators. And DISH and DirecTV. At 40 cents!!
Then comes the other three states. Yes, like any broad-based school, there are Texas alumni around its region, indeed around the country. But as a part of a basic package. In OKLAHOMA!!! No system with any on-the-ground knowledge of its customers in the surrounding states is going to tell them their bills just went up so they can watch Texas girl's volleyball.
Then the nation. This is a huge problem. Texas is a nice program. But no better nor more passionatly followed than 30 or 40 other programs we all could name. If this deal actually worked, then what? You can forget cable out of state. No cable system has the capacity to carry 30 or 40 such channels, and it would be a burden to DirecTV to do so.
The only way I see this working is as an internet based deal, and I think we are still a decade away from enough people having enough bandwidth and savy to do that.
And then you have A&M. IMHO, while it still would have been a bad idea, it would have been a less bad idea to have doubled the amount of available material, and maybe added, some substantial %age more fans, by making this a joint venture with A&M. Or even with several other Texas colleges.
I say this goes the way the Royals network, etc. Its just not viable.