UConn Football: How would Huskies fit in the Big 12?

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about UConn football joining the Big 12, especially after the league just concluded its preseason media days this week. Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark has apparently been visiting the Storrs, Conn., campus, as well, expressing the conference’s interest in potentially adding the Huskies.

No one denies that adding both Connecticut basketball programs would be a huge win for the Big 12. The men’s program just won the national title in April, marking a remarkable fifth crown for the Huskies in the past 25 years. The women’s program has been one of the best in the game, too, having won a total of 11 national titles — including four in a row from 2013 to 2016 under legendary head coach Geno Auriemma.

Adding the Huskies would solidify the Big 12’s footing as the undisputed strongest basketball league in the country. What kind of fit would the UConn football program have with the Big 12, though?

UConn football’s fit with the Big 12

Texas and Oklahoma are set to leave the league after this season in order to join the SEC in 2024. That will put the Big 12 (finally) back at a dozen teams, just like the name of the conference suggests.

Four new programs are joining the Big 12 this fall: BYU, Houston, Cincinnati, and Central Florida. The Cougars, Bearcats, and Knights have all been conference mates of UConn in recent years through either the Big East or the American Athletic Conference, in addition to West Virginia, which joined the Big 12 from the moribund Big East more than a decade ago.

Picturing UConn’s fit with the Big 12 is tough geographically (think of travel time and expenses). Though the Mountaineers and the Huskies used to be Big East rivals, the two campuses are more than 500 miles apart. It’s nearly 800 miles to reach the Bearcats near the banks of the Ohio River from the University of Connecticut, too. Down in Orlando, UCF is in the same time zone but is more than 1,200 miles away.

The lack of on-field success is another concern for adding UConn’s football program. Despite last year’s modest success under first-year head coach Jim Mora, the Huskies are in the midst of 12 consecutive seasons with a losing record. Last year’s squad went 6-6 in the regular season before losing the Myrtle Beach Bowl to Marshall.

The Huskies won a total of four games between 2018 and 2021. The team was so bad, the university decided to spare everyone the embarrassment and canceled the entire 2020 season during the COVID-19 pandemic as if the program was in the Ivy League.

The team’s best stretch at the FBS or Division I-A level of college football was between 2007 and 2010, when the Huskies won at least eight games in each of those four seasons. The 2010 squad reached the Fiesta Bowl, where it lost to the Big 12’s Oklahoma Sooners.

Cole Welliver, an ESPN Top 300 quarterback recruit from Texas in the high school Class of 2024, committed to the Huskies earlier this summer and said that the team mentioned the possibility of playing in the Big 12 sometime soon.

More talent than normal might be making its way to the Constitution State, but it’s hard to forget that this is a program that has lost games in the past several years to Holy Cross and UMass.

Teams like Temple own a five-game winning streak against the Huskies. South Florida has beaten UConn in eight consecutive meetings. UConn isn’t only a non-power conference program, it’s a weak mid-major one, at that.

It’s difficult to see UConn football being a good fit in the Big 12, but Yormark has indicated that he sees basketball as something that can truly “move the needle.” The conference added Baylor in 1996 along with Texas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech. The Bears served as a league doormat and won exactly 14 conference games in their first 14 years in the league, which included four winless seasons in league play.

If UConn does indeed join the Big 12 on the strength of its basketball, expect the Huskies to replicate Baylor’s welcome to the league from the 1990s.