Brett Yormark didn’t turn the Big 12 into a powerhouse, but he did keep it from drifting into chaos.
When he arrived in 2022, the league was staring down real instability after the departures of Texas and Oklahoma. Four years later, Yormark is leaving with the Big 12 still sitting where it started: the No. 4 conference in college athletics.
That sounds static on paper. It wasn’t.
The league he inherited was fragile. The one he leaves is still standing.
Yormark’s first big moves were about survival. The Big 12 added Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State, then moved quickly to land a media-rights package, mostly with ESPN and Fox, before the market became even more crowded and complicated. Those decisions didn’t produce a splashy payday, but they did prevent a bad outcome.
He also made it clear pretty early that he wasn’t going to operate like a traditional commissioner. Some of his swings landed. Others didn’t.
The attempt to add Connecticut was a miss, especially for a league already loaded with basketball strength. International competition, mostly in Mexico, never really caught on.
The glass court used at last year’s Big 12 tournament was a disaster, and Yormark eventually admitted it and had it replaced for the end of the men’s tournament. The Monster Energy deal brought a loud logo, but not the revenue that would have justified it.
Then came the moment when the league’s business side turned into something much more serious.
Texas Tech tried to force quarterback Brendan Sorsby into uniform, despite breaking nearly every NCAA gambling rule on the books. The move created a major problem for the conference, and Yormark, with support from 15 other schools, responded by filing a federal lawsuit that blocked Sorsby and removed him from college football.
It was a hard line to draw against a program that had reached the 2025 College Football Playoff and looked like the favorite to repeat with Sorsby. But the Big 12 treated it as a matter of conference unity, and Yormark backed that position all the way.
Even without Sorsby, the league still has football that looks capable of making noise. One-loss Texas Tech is still in the mix and gets one-loss Arizona at home Saturday.
BYU, now 6-1, helped lift the league’s profile and power ratings by beating Notre Dame. Utah is unbeaten heading to Cincinnati.
For now, the product is holding up.
The bigger question is what “holding up” means in the years ahead. The Big 12 can still survive, but its ceiling remains lower than the Big Ten and SEC, and just below the ACC, which at least has No. 1-ranked Miami and two other programs with national championships in the last 13 years.
Even so, the ACC has its own stability issues, with Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina and Miami all positioning themselves for a possible move elsewhere. Their fight against the expansion-limiting provisions in the Protect College Sports Act points in that direction.
“Elsewhere,” naturally, means the Big Ten or SEC. Not the Big 12.
That’s where the uncertainty gets bigger. If the Big Ten and SEC eventually pull away from everyone else, they’ll split up what little value is left, with North Carolina and Virginia likely near the top of that list and Miami, Clemson and Florida State also in the mix. The Big 12 might not have any schools that can be poached, which would make it stable but also lock it into second-tier status.
There’s another possibility, though: a super league of 36 to 40 schools. In that world, the rest of the ACC could join the Big 12 in a second tier of roughly 30 schools, with the remainder of FBS folded into some larger fractured setup. It would be the next step in college sports splintering apart, and there would be only so many winners.
That’s why Yormark’s replacement matters so much. The next Big 12 commissioner has to be more inventive than the average old-school administrator and more willing to think creatively about how to keep the league relevant.
The Big Ten and SEC have the biggest power. The Big 12 has to work with less and squeeze every advantage it can find.
Yormark’s tenure didn’t transform the conference, but it did stabilize it and make it better. In this era, that counts. The hard part is what comes next.
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Arizona Faces Its Biggest Big 12 Test Yet At Texas Tech
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The stakes are what give this one extra weight. Arizona and Texas Tech are tied for second place in the conference standings, which makes this more than just a test of form - it is the kind of game that can reshape the league picture in a hurry. The Red Raiders also bring a disruptive defense into the matchup, with a knack for creating turnovers and flipping field position, which only adds to the pressure on Arizona as it tries to keep its run going. [Read more 🡒]