Oklahoma football: Big 12 commish does not anticipate OU, Texas leaving early
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma football schedule for the 2023 and 2024 seasons will feature some new Big 12 opponents.
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said last week that he fully expects OU and Texas to fulfill their contractual obligations and not depart the Big 12 before the conference’s current media rights agreement expires on June 30, 2025.
There has been widespread speculation ever since Oklahoma and Texas announced plans to join the Southeastern Conference that both schools would opt to leave the Big 12 before 2025. Neither school has backed off of their earlier public statement that intended to fulfill their obligation to the Big 12, the new Big 12 commissioner is making no bones that he intends to hold them to that commitment.
Representatives of both Oklahoma and Texas were present for the league meetings in Dallas a couple of weeks ago.
Speaking to reporters during Big 12 women’s basketball media days in Kansas City, Missouri, Yormark said the 2023 conference schedule is being worked on now and will include 14 teams, providing for the four new members — BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida (UCF), who will join the conference for the 2023 academic year.
Next fall’s schedule, which could be finalized early in November, the commissioner said, will include a nine-game league schedule with all Big 12 teams playing each other at least once over a two-year period.
The football schedules for both next season and 2024 will be developed with the inclusion of OU and Texas as well as the four incoming schools. Yormark confirmed that the Big 12 would not revert back to the divisional structure that was put in place when the conference was formed in 1996 and later discontinued after the 2010-11 academic year, and also said that the schedule would preserve the natural rivalries that currently exist in the conference.
Regardless of when Oklahoma and Texas actually make the jump to the SEC, both schools would be required to pay an agreed upon exit fee of $80 million. That amount would increase further if they decided to leave before June 30, 2025, when the current grant of media rights expires.
In the past week, the Big 12 announced it had reached an agreement with ESPN and FOX on a new six-year media rights agreement. According to Sports Media Journal, the new deal is worth $2.28 billion and an annual average of $380 million. The six-year extension runs through 2030-31 and would pay out an average of 31.6 million to the conference’s 12 members beginning in 2025-26.
The Big 12 has two years remaining on its current grant of rights, which is worth $220 million annually.