Commissioner Brett Yormark climbed the stage Tuesday at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas to kick off Big 12 media days, introducing a 16-team conference that now spans from Tucson, Ariz., to Morgantown, W.Va., from Salt Lake City to Orlando, Fla. He casually roamed the platform during his opening remarks, wireless microphone clipped to his tie, a showman at home in a city that indulges such characters.
A good chunk of his comments focused on the business ambitions of the Big 12, a conference that fancies itself a disruptor of sorts. But he also laid out the narrative for the upcoming 2024 football season.
The Big 12 is embracing parity. Texas and Oklahoma are gone, leaving a freshly scattered, wide-open league in their stead.
“We will be the deepest conference in America,” said Yormark. “Every week will matter.
“I’m gonna say that one more time,” he added, repeating the same line for effect. “We have star power and parity.”
It’s an enticing sales pitch in a sport that doesn’t tend to have the most even footing. Other power conferences are defined by their VIPs and velvet ropes. The new Big 12 is festival seating. It’s bold. It’s different.
But for a league that is still securing its place in this brave new world of college football — exploring both innovative and risky ideas as it reckons with shifting financial realities — the truth is that parity probably isn’t the best path forward.
Yormark was upfront about the conference’s ambitions to be aggressive and proactive and to compete at the highest level, on and off the field. But if the Big 12 wants to avoid getting lapped by the Big Ten and SEC, let alone attempt to keep pace, it’s better off if a perennial juggernaut or two emerges from this newly formed 16-team lineup.
The deepest conference in America could use a powerhouse.
Modesty was not in the Big 12′s talking points this week. Yormark declared that the league had solidified itself as “one of the top three conferences in America,” chiding the ACC in the process. He didn’t rest there.
“I will not stop until we are the number one conference in America,” Yormark said.
Some of that is coachspeak, the type of towel waving a good commissioner does at their league’s annual showcase. Media day isn’t the time or place to fall in line. But this is also the type of bold, disruptive identity the Big 12 has adopted — one Yormark genuinely believes in, and one that has already paid massive dividends since he took over in the summer of 2022, outmaneuvering the Pac-12 and surviving the realignment shrapnel.
It’s the same motivation behind those innovative and risky ideas the league is exploring: selling the conference naming rights, taking on private-equity capital, separating the football and basketball TV packages down the road. With $20 million-plus in annual revenue sharing per school on the horizon via the House settlement and a widening financial gap between the Big Ten and SEC, all of those considerations are geared toward maximizing revenues and best positioning the league for its next TV contract, another thing Yormark talked about on Tuesday. The Big 12′s six-year extension with ESPN and Fox hasn’t even officially kicked in yet, but the commissioner is already eyeing the early negotiating window in January 2030. At league meetings in May in Dallas, he said “value creation” was the top priority in an effort to become the “most relevant and nationally recognized conference in America.”
If the Big 12 wants to achieve those goals, or at the very least not fall woefully short of them, it needs to hope a consistent contender in football can establish itself in the national championship picture. And soon. It needs a top tier of teams that are regularly winning conference titles or finding another way into the expanded College Football Playoff, and then making some noise once they get there. That doesn’t mean winning national championships, necessarily, but legitimately vying for them, and giving the Big 12 a steady presence on the brightest stage.
Right now, the conference has the makings of a competitive, balanced league with no national-title prospects. A spinning roulette wheel of three-loss conference champions and quick CFP exits won’t cut it, not in a 12-team (or eventual 14-team) playoff field that will be stocked with multiple Big Ten and SEC foes. Known quantities bring in the casual fans and big TV viewerships, and for better or worse, those are the numbers that drive the business of college football.
This is where fans, especially of the longtime Big 12 members, will understandably roll their eyes, having finally shed the Texas and Oklahoma hubris that ran rampant through the league for so long, even during those stretches when it didn’t result in conference titles — for the Longhorns in particular. But that doesn’t have to be the blueprint.
The Big 12 can’t replicate what Texas and Oklahoma supplied in terms of brand marketability. Nor should it seek that. (The Coach Prime effect Colorado experienced last year will likely carry over into this season’s TV numbers, but it won’t last forever.) The conference doesn’t need schools with outsized egos and the power struggles that come with it. There’s value in unity and stability, something the ACC is currently learning the hard way. But if you don’t have the big names, the best way to achieve the national relevance Yormark — and the TV networks — so clearly desire is to have bona fide championship contenders.
This is an admittedly tall order, and not one that can be fulfilled by a shrewd influx of revenue or disruptor vibes. Only three of the Big 12′s 16 teams have ever won an NCAA-recognized national championship in football, the most recent being Colorado in 1990. Before that it was BYU in 1984 and TCU in 1938. (Apologies, Oklahoma State and UCF.) Yet it’s not impossible either, as evidenced by Cincinnati crashing the CFP in 2021 from the Group of 5 or TCU’s runner-up finish in 2022, and access will get much easier in the expanded format. Winning the league basically guarantees that team a No. 3 or 4 seed and first-round bye in the new CFP.
The other good news for the Big 12 is the same reason the league feels so wide open this year: pretty much every program is a candidate. We like to hypothesize about the next sleeping giant in college football, the next Clemson. Maybe it’s Utah or Kansas State, the two teams picked atop this year’s preseason media poll, or more of a dark horse team like Texas Tech or UCF. Maybe one of the 16 teams has hit on the right coach, the right recruiting approach, the right NIL platform and becomes an unexpected force over the next five years. Maybe a rose will grow from parity, freed from the shadow of Texas and Oklahoma. We’ll see. If the past five years of college football have taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen.
The “deepest conference in America” is an exciting moniker. It will be fun to watch it unfold, something Big 12 loyalists and CFB diehards can celebrate and get behind. It makes sense for a league in transition to lean into that narrative this season, during which it will be obvious the ways television money has carved up the sport and Frankensteined it back together. But that’s the cost of doing very lucrative business, one the Big 12 would like to remain a part of. And in college football, parity doesn’t pay the bills.
“I live my life by the value equation: Those that create value deserve to be rewarded,” Yormark said Tuesday, a dealmaker ever committed to peeking around corners and putting his conference in position to succeed. “I’m really, really focused on just making sure the Big 12 is the best version of itself.”
As college football enters what Yormark himself described as a “new era,” the reality is that the best outlook for the Big 12 is one he has the least control over.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.