Big 12 Football: Could expansion save it from becoming next Big East?

Big 12 football is at a crossroads right now and technically it’s OK until 2025 when Texas and Oklahoma leave for the SEC but that can change and it more than likely needs to expand for long-term stability.

There is a long history of NCAA conference expansion and the Big 12 needs to anticipate the possibility of members from its conference potentially joining another conference before 2025. It also has to worry about no longer being a Power Five conference if the Alliance actually works with the Big Ten, ACC, and Pac-12 and the SEC expands further creating a super conference with 18 or 20 teams.

Another potential issue for the Big 12 would be if the Big Ten decides the alliance between them, the ACC, and the Pac-12 is not in their best long term interests and the three conferences expand to compete with the SEC as the top league in all of college football.

However, there are viable options for the Big 12 for long term stability.

The Big 12 needs to avoid the same mistakes that the Big East made when Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech left for the ACC as 2004 was considered the first major shift that a power conference made in recent college football expansion.

In 2021, the Big 12 needs to anticipate Texas and Oklahoma finding a way to leave prior to the 2025 season. It can also learn from the missteps of the Big East in what they did in expanding their conference in football.

For example, the Big East had only eight teams for football in 2012. Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse would leave to join the ACC and Rutgers would leave to join the Big Ten leaving them with only four members. Prior to the start of the 2013 season, the Big East no longer had a football conference. The Big 12 should do everything in its power to avoid that fate.

Assuming Texas and Oklahoma find a way to leave the Big 12 prior to 2025, the Big 12 would be like the Big East in 2012 with only eight schools in Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, TCU, Baylor, Texas Tech, Iowa State, and West Virginia.

The Big 12 looks like it has a year to focus on a legitimate plan to expand as it appears that the Pac-12, ACC, Big Ten, and SEC have no further plans to expand in 2021. The Big 12 can wait and hope that Texas and Oklahoma don’t leaver prior to the beginning of the 2025 season but that does not appear to be the best path forward to long term stability of the conference.

The Big 12 needs to expand not just geographically but also into bigger TV/stream media markets that they are not already in. Unlike the Big Ten, it doesn’t have academic criteria like a new school having to be an Association of American Universities member and they don’t have to get member from the other Power Five conferences to be successful long-term.

Let’s take a look at potential schools that the Big 12 can add through conference expansion.