The Big 12 is losing Texas and Oklahoma, and seems to want to replace them with UConn and Gonzaga.
That’s the joke, probably. Losing Oklahoma hurts; losing the Texas money-printing machine might be legitimately catastrophic for the league. Instead of attempting a run on the Pac 12 or ACC to buffer its football bona fides, the Big 12 went for… a program from Washington without a football team, and UConn, possibly the most snakebitten FBS football program of the last decade and change.
(To give an idea of just how. much. money. Texas has: its most recent reported endowment of $42.9 billion is more than double that of all 2023 full Big 12 members put together.)
I am not making this up; CBS Sports has it, and even if it’s a preliminary concern that never goes anywhere, it’s important to remember just how unlikely this sort of move is for the Big 12 to even consider.
This is not apples to apples kind of acquisition; it is not even apples to the collected first-edition works of Jane Austen. This is a conference—based in football-mad Texas, of all places—deciding that building the necessary coffers to battle the SEC and Big 10 on the gridiron is folly and pivoting to what I’ve always prayed a league would become: frustrated enough with football to begin pursuing excellence in basketball.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t see this coming for the Big 12. The ACC, sure; the Pac 12, to Bill Walton’s never-ending delight, absolutely. But the Big 12 has spent most of my life giving us football charmingly short on defense and long on spectacular offensive spectacles and churning out programs that can regularly contend for national titles. Some of these programs are even not Oklahoma and Texas (hey there, TCU!); but, most are, in fact, Oklahoma and Texas.