Brett Yormark’s run as Big 12 commissioner is headed for an abrupt ending, and the timing makes the news hit even harder for the league he helped stabilize. ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported Friday that Yormark “made the decision to leave” and is expected to move into a role outside college sports soon, though he will remain with the conference at least through January 2027.
That means the Big 12 still has Yormark for the stretch run of this season, including the Big 12 Championship Game and bowl season. But the league is now staring at a future without the executive who arrived as an outsider and became the face of its response to realignment chaos.
Yormark took over as the Big 12’s fifth commissioner on Aug. 1, 2022, after the league hired him on June 29 of that year to replace Bob Bowlsby. The Roc Nation executive and former Brooklyn Nets CEO came into college sports with little experience in the space, but he wasted no time making his mark. He opened media rights talks with ESPN and Fox more than a year before the exclusive negotiating window, and the Big 12 soon landed a six-year, $2.28 billion agreement.
That early move had ripple effects well beyond the league office. It left the Pac-12 exposed, and Yormark later helped bring Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah into the Big 12 in the summer of 2023. He also allowed Texas and Oklahoma to exit a year early, calling the arrangement a “win-win for all parties.”
The board responded to that run of moves by extending him through the 2029-30 academic year in May 2025. Even with that new deal in hand, Yormark is now walking away with more than three years still left on it.
His final months also included some ambitious ideas that never got across the finish line. Yormark pushed to add UConn and Gonzaga, but the Big 12 board did not approve either school.
And while the conference has benefited from his energy and aggressiveness, it now has to sort out what comes next. No successor has been named, and the job ahead is not a small one.
The College Football Playoff is moving toward an expansion from 12 to 24 teams in 2027, a change expected to do away with conference championship games. Yormark supported that 24-team model, and this month he said the Big 12 would need something new to replace its title game.
“We’ll need another tent-pole event to take its place, and I’m working on that now,” Yormark said Oct. 19 in Ames, Iowa.
That responsibility will now likely fall to someone else, along with the next media rights negotiation for the conference, which is expected around 2030.
Yormark’s farewell tour, if that’s what the next few months amount to, had a bright public face. At Big 12 basketball media days in Kansas City 10 days before the report, he sounded energized about the league’s place in the sport.
“I don’t think there’s a better time to be part of the Big 12 than right now,” Yormark said.
He also used a family metaphor to describe his connection to the schools in the league.
“I tell everyone, I’ve got 16 kids. And I love them all equally,” Yormark told ESPN.
But the ending has not been perfectly smooth. In June, the Big 12 sued Texas Tech and the Texas attorney general over potential sanctions tied to quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who left the Red Raiders for the NFL supplemental draft hours later.
And this month, Big 12 officials incorrectly enforced a 10-second runoff at the end of regulation in UCF’s double-overtime upset of No. 2 BYU.
The name of Yormark’s next job has not been disclosed.
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