ARLINGTON, Texas — Brett Yormark was definitely trying to send a message during his introduction as the newest commissioner of the Big 12 Conference last summer, when he said the league was “open for business.”
A year into the job, Yormark said that statement was about more than just ongoing realignment and the potential of additional expansion during a transformative time throughout college football.
“I think people took that as, my god, this guy’s new and he wants to go and disrupt, I guess, in some respects,” Yormark said Wednesday at the start of the Big 12’s football media days event. “Open for business was that we were going to explore every and all possibility to grow revenue, to diversify our conference and do things that hadn’t been done before. And we did a lot of that.”
And, yes, there is still a plan for expansion, even though Yormark doesn’t really want to talk about it.
The Big 12 is already bigger after BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF officially became members July 1, about 17 months after their invitations to the evolving conference. There will be 14 teams this fall with Oklahoma and Texas — the league’s only remaining programs that have won national championships in football — playing their final seasons before heading to the Southeastern Conference next summer to make that league 16 schools strong.