Big 12 football: Ranking how likely each school is to leave the conference
By John Scimeca
9. Baylor
The Bears were originally included in a package deal with Texas, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M to the Big 12 in 1996 due to some Lone Star state politics. It’s hard to picture the Bears in any of the other Power Five conferences at this moment in terms of “fit” or physical geography.
With a strong football program in the past decade, however, Baylor becomes a more attractive candidate — the Bears have reached double-digit wins in six different seasons since 2011 when quarterback Robert Griffin III won the Heisman Trophy. The Bears also won the conference championship last year.
8. Houston
Head coach Dana Holgorsen clearly believed in the Cougars’ potential when he took the job after a fairly successful stint in charge at West Virginia, a soon-to-be conference foe of Houston’s. Houston stands to greatly benefit from the greater exposure and competitiveness that the Big 12 can provide compared to the American or the Conference USA.
Houston might be an enticing opportunity for a future pillaging power conference because it could serve as an anchor for the Houston metro area in terms of a media market and a recruiting hotbed.
7. Kansas
The Jayhawks stink on the football field; that’s an indisputable fact from the past 15 years. The men’s basketball program, fresh off winning the 2022 national championship, is elite and powerful in ways that are probably only matched by 3-4 other schools in the country.
Could the Jayhawks parlay their influence on the basketball court into a better destination than the Big 12 in the future? Perhaps only if Lance Leipold can make the football program at least somewhat competitive (see that upset of Texas last year?) — among all Power 5 schools, the Jayhawks are with Vanderbilt, Rutgers, and Duke as the worst right now.