A few years earlier, UT athletic director DeLoss Dodds, a visionary in many ways, had approached his counterpart at Texas A&M with a proposal to team up for a cable channel. The Aggies turned him down, and by the time they developed second thoughts, Dodds informed them it was too late. The Longhorns had become convinced they could go it alone, and their negotiations with major networks only reinforced that belief.

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On Oct. 16, just a few days after the Sports Business Journal reported that Fox had emerged as the favorite to land what would become the Longhorn Network, UT’s football team triumphed at No. 5 Nebraska. The winning, it seemed, never would stop. And soon there would be a way for viewers to revel in it 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

The plan made all the sense in the world, which is why so many at A&M, Oklahoma and elsewhere feared it. And a dozen years later, now that those fears have proved to be unfounded as the upstart network nears its ignominious demise, we should be clear about why it was doomed from the beginning.

LHN didn’t fail UT.

UT failed LHN.

Current Longhorns athletic director Chris Del Conte caused a bit of a stir this week at an event with alumni and supporters in Dallas when he answered a question about LHN by asking, “Are you talking about the History Channel?” This was far from the first time he’d made that joke to those around him, but he later wrote on Twitter that he “love(s) our relationship” with the network, which he called an “incredible resource for Texas.”

In Del Conte’s defense, the reason people at the alumni event laughed is because the quip rang true. ESPN promised to pay UT and IMG College $300 million over 20 years for the right to own and operate LHN, but ever since its inception in 2011, it’s become known more for regular reruns of Vince Young’s heroics at the 2006 Rose Bowl than just about anything else.

But if the focus of LHN’s programming tilted toward history, it only was because the Longhorns gave producers so few compelling options in the present.

In the dozen years and a month leading to that October 2010 victory at Nebraska, UT’s football program had gone 132-29, averaging more than 10 victories per year, finishing in the top 10 seven times, and playing in four Bowl Championship Series games. In the other major revenue sport, the men’s basketball team had been to five Sweet 16s and three Elite Eights in the previous eight years, and was coming off a season in which it had been ranked No. 1 in the country.

The week after they came home from Nebraska, as ESPN was finalizing its LHN bid, the Longhorns lost to Iowa State. Since then, the football team has gone 79-65 with five losing seasons, and the basketball team hasn’t made the Sweet 16 even once.

It’s no wonder people didn’t watch. LHN employed some of the best professionals in the business, many who had been accomplished before and many who would go on to thrive elsewhere, but no amount of fancy production could mask the fact that the network’s supposed star — UT athletics itself — was a no-show.

So through no fault of its own LHN became a punchline, even to those whose own shortcomings gave it no chance. UT’s teams lost, so ratings were abysmal. Because ratings were abysmal, LHN stopped replacing reporters. And because LHN stopped replacing reporters, it was left with, well, history.

While coverage of sports like volleyball and baseball excelled — and while those teams benefited from said coverage — that’s not where the advertising revenue is. And once UT announced its plans to join the Southeastern Conference by 2025, the writing was on the wall. When the move happens, LHN will be shuttered, which has left those still working there trying to figure out their futures even while making sure their well-received baseball and softball broadcasts go off without a hitch.

Was a single-school college sports network a bad idea 12 years ago? Maybe, even if UT doesn’t regret cashing ESPN’s checks. The media landscape was changing back then, as it continues to change now, and the Longhorns might have been destined to end up on the SEC Network all along.

But LHN didn’t make every UT football coach from Mack Brown to Steve Sarkisian underachieve. It didn’t turn a once-surging basketball program into a March Madness afterthought. It didn’t force the Longhorns to spend an extra $15 million per year on uninspiring results, game after game and season after season.

It just filmed it all.

And if, given access to a decade’s worth of footage of a program once poised to be the most powerful of the millennium, viewers still preferred history instead?

Maybe the butt of the joke shouldn’t be a network.