Big 12 Basketball: Pros and cons of recent serious expansion candidates
By Joey Loose
Conference realignment remains a big topic in the news these days. This current branch of realignment has already made a few major waves, with Kansas and Oklahoma heading to the SEC, UCLA and USC off to the Big Ten, and a slew of programs joining Big 12 Basketball and overall conference in a few months. However, there have been recent rumblings that even more moves are on the horizon, moves that could greatly shift the face of several of the most prominent athletic conferences in the nation.
Recent moves have rebuilt or strengthened the Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC, leaving the ACC and Pac-12 as conferences needing to make moves to preserve their own futures. There have already been rumblings about either of these conferences collapsing, though that’s not specifically what we’re focusing on today.
We’re looking specifically at the Big 12 and reading deeper into the recent rumblings. The conference will already look very different next season, with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF joining the league for this upcoming year. However, it certainly looks like they are not done entertaining the thought of adding to the league. With a few of their fellow power conferences on their last legs and others becoming super-conferences in the near future, the Big 12 certainly wants to become the latter, not the former.
A laundry list of teams has been considered, through rumor or more serious rumbling, but moves to improve the Big 12 seem imminent. Today, we’re considering the serious candidates for the Big 12 and what they would bring to this league. We’ll be focusing mostly on basketball and football, as well as other matters connected to these schools and programs. You could argue that other schools deserve consideration, but we’re focusing on the six most serious, proceeding strictly in alphabetical order.