The new-look Big 12 conference

Who runs things here?

The Big 12 is routinely in a state of flux, but a pretty massive transformation was formalized earlier this week with the release of the 2023 football schedule.

The 2023 Big 12 season will include 14 participants.

Texas and Oklahoma, the ir8te (eight scorned teams soon to beleft behind by UT and OU), and the as of yet moniker-less new four of Cincinnati, Central Florida, Houston, and BYU (4tuitous4???). Texas and Oklahoma will leave for the SEC either after the 2023 or 2024 season, leaving behind a Big 12 conference which actually has 12 teams for the first time since 2011.

The release of the first expanded schedule unleashed the swarm of locusts which is UCF Twitter upon the rest of the Big 12 and the dynamics of the league and its rivalries are slowly beginning to reshape around the new configuration.

As I chronicled in my book, the league was originally formed because the Big 8 (very different from the ir8te) needed to expand their demographic footprint beyond the smaller flyover states of Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. They added some choice pieces from the Southwest Conference, including the University of Texas.

When the new league was formed in 1996, Nebraska was the big dog. Tom Osborne had outlasted Barry Switzer at Oklahoma and really fine-tuned the Cornhusker machine into a title factory. The Sooners were wandering through the wilderness, trying out John Blake before they’d eventually move on to Bob Stoops.

Of the Big 8 schools, there were basically three national contenders amongst them. The languishing Sooners, Osborne’s Nebraska, and then arguably the Colorado Buffaloes who’d won the National Championship in 1990. Amongst the incoming four SWC schools filling out the league to 12, Texas and Texas A&M were the only two with nationally competitive resources.

None of those schools will be around soon.

It begs the question. Who’s in charge here now? Is there one or many schools who could be poised to unleash a run of dominance over the rest of the league? Or will it be the ultimate crab bucket where no one can really assert themselves consistently at the top but instead the leaders will vacillate wildly based on which teams have established hires in place like we saw in American Athletic Conference over the last decade?