Big 12 Football: Top 5 expansion candidates for the conference

If Big 12 football tried to get back to a full dozen, where might they turn? Here are five attractive candidates for the top-tier conference.

Which major conference fared worst in the most recent round of realignment that transpired in college football at the front end of the 2010s?

Trick question… it was the Big East, of course, which fell apart as soon as the demise of the BCS led to the loss of its power-conference status.

Close behind, though, was the Big 12. The league nearly folded after it lost four of its original members. Colorado went to the Pac-12. Rival Nebraska went the other direction to the Big Ten. The SEC stole away Texas A&M and Missouri, ending two long-standing rivalries with Texas and Kansas respectively.

Texas almost deserted the league to join Colorado as a Pac-16 team, which would have pulled along the Oklahoma schools and Texas Tech and left a shell of the former Big 12. All that would have remained was Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State, and Baylor.

The Big 12 managed to get back to 10 teams, bringing TCU and West Virginia into the fold. But the fact remains that the Big 12 is still two teams shy of filling out its name. Should another wave of expansion and realignment occur, the Big 12 would once again have the wolves salivating at the door unless it radically pursued growth opportunities.

Unlike the other Power Five conferences, the Big 12 is unlikely to steal away any of its rival leagues’ schools. But here are five teams that could turn things in the favor of the Big 12 and help them to credibly grow to a dozen and possibly beyond.