After a long and highly fruitful association with the Big 12-8-7 and 6 Conferences, the Oklahoma football program will be changing its affiliation in the not-too-distant future. But before that, it may be part of a 14-team league divided by two divisions.
Oklahoma and Texas announced late last summer that they were leaving the Big 12 to become members of the Southeastern Conference. Since that announcement, the Big 12 has come to agreement with four new schools to join the conference as early as the 2023 season.
The Big 12 is looking ahead to the 2023 football season and the planning assumption that Cincinnati, Houston, Brigham Young (BYU) and Central Florida (UCF) will join the conference in the summer of 2023 for the 2023-24 academic year.
Officials of both OU and Texas have stated publicly that they plan to fulfill the media rights agreement they have with the Big 12. The existing television rights agreement the Big 12 has with ESPN and FOX extends through 2025.
That does not mean that Oklahoma and Texas couldn’t leave the conference earlier, but to do so would incur a significant exit fee that could run into well into eight figures.
Big 12 working groups in several sports, including football, are looking at structuring options should the conference grow from its current size of 10 schools to as many as 14 in 2023 and 2024. The Big 12 is operating under the assumption that OU and Texas will not leave before the current rights agreement ends in 2025.
NCAA rules state that conference with 12 or more teams must split into divisions for football.
“We’re going to sort it all and figure what the divisions look like and what the competition model will be and all that,” said Big 12 associate commissioner Ed Stewart and cited in an article by Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports.
One Big 12 official involved in the process told Dodd that they want to avoid having to reshuffle the divisions after Oklahoma and Texas leave the mix, whether it’s early or after the rights agreement expires. The simplest way to go about that is to place the Sooners and Longhorns in separate divisions consisting of seven teams each.
Oklahoma and Texas have played each other nearly every season since 1900 and were part of the South Division of the Big 12 for 15 seasons before the conference underwent realignment beginning in 2011.
Stewart told CBS’ Dodd that the conference has not decided whether to separate the divisions competitively or geographically.
Here is a projected structure that might accommodate multiple objectives:
North Division
BYU
Cincinnati
Iowa State
Kansas
Kansas State
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
South Division
Baylor
Houston
TCU
Texas
Texas Tech
UCF
West Virginia
Interestingly, had this been the Big 12 alignment this past season, the conference would have had four teams in the top 10 (No. 4 Cincinnati, No. 5 Baylor, No. 7 Oklahoma State and No. 10 Oklahoma) and six teams in the top 20 (No. 17 Houston and No. 19 BYU).