ESPN: The worldwide leader in swaying sports?

ESPN raised eyebrows this year when it sealed a 20-year, $300 million deal with the University of Texas to launch The Longhorn Network. Many in the Big 12 were wary of ESPN devoting an entire channel to one school.

The blockbuster deal certainly reinforced ESPN's reputation as the most pervasive sports network in college sports. But it also raised red flags, particularly two months ago when ESPN.com published a story promoting Top 25 games and included the Texas-Rice game - even though the Longhorns were not ranked in the Top 25.

The sports blog Awful Announcing called it "Exhibit A of ESPN bending the rules."

But is ESPN now bending rules to influence conference realignment?

According to an article in USA Today, many believe the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports is also the leading force behind the high-stakes conference shuffle currently dominating college sports headlines.

As USA Today notes, for some, "Exhibit A" was a recent statement by Gene DeFilippo. The Boston College athletics director said last month that ESPN "told us what to do" before the ACC poached Pittsburgh and Syracuse from the Big East. DeFilippo later told the Boston Globe that he misspoke but clearly his comments had stoked long-held suspicions about ESPN's influence.

USA Today notes that ESPN's sway over college sports is everywhere at once. For starters, the network holds TV rights for college sports that will bring in an average of more than $700 million per year by 2012. Not inconsequentially, the newspaper adds: "ESPN also reports the news it's often a party to making."

Andy Geiger, a former athletics director at Ohio State University, told the newspaper that he doesn't thinks there is "any line anymore as to who's in charge."

"We're doing business with an entertainment company whose only way of surviving involves the number of eyeballs watching the screen," Geiger said. "That is the driving force in what I see as all the decisions being made."

ESPN flatly denied claims that it's playing puppeteer to conference realignment.

"These (realignment) decisions lie entirely within the conferences and the universities," Burke Magnus, ESPN's VP for college sports programming, told the newspaper. "We haven't been advocates of change in this realm because our business interests are best served by stability."

Perhaps. But ESPN's Longhorn Network has been anything but a stabilizer in the Big 12. Shortly after the network launched, Texas A&M bolted the conference and Missouri seems poised to follow.

The USA Today article raises another salient point: How can ESPN stay neutral in realignment talks when the network has contractual ties with each conference involved?

Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione conceded to the newspaper that ESPN's pervasiveness in college sports is a "concern."

"I suppose it is a conundrum for them," Castiglione said. "We understand they have multiple partnerships with institutions and other conferences. We all agree there's a concern. I'm just not sure how we do anything about it."