KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Amid reports of plans to expand the College Football Playoff to 24 teams, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said the league would pivot if expansion were to eliminate conference championship games and would "replace" them.
"First of all, nothing has been done yet with the College Football Playoff. It's only speculation," he said Tuesday at Big 12 media day. "Nothing is final, so I don't want to get too much into the details there, but tentpole events, for us, matter. Our championship game has been very valuable. Our basketball tournament, both men's and women's, has been very valuable. And if there is a point in time where a change is made, we will look to backstop those events with other events. We're in the event business. It drives a lot of fan engagement and excitement, so we'll see what happens in the future, but those are big moments for us. And if for some reason, if one goes away, we'll replace it with something different."
Last year's Big 12 football title game between Texas Tech and BYU set a record for the league's championship matchup with 85,519 attending at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. On the basketball side, the league announced in 2024 that it had reached an agreement to keep the men's and women's tournaments in Kansas City, Missouri, at T-Mobile Center through 2031.
Yormark said the expansion of the NCAA basketball tournament to 76 teams should benefit the Big 12, which had eight men's teams and eight women's teams in the field last season. Yormark also said Tuesday that the Big 12 is the "second-best basketball league" behind only the NBA. The league's nine first-round picks in the 2026 NBA draft was a conference record.
Yormark said the league is having conversations about potentially going back to 20 conference games, which the league experimented with during the 2024-25 season before returning to 18 games last season. The chaos around expanded postseasons, however, has also generated more buzz about potential realignment in the years ahead.
Yormark said he believes the league is good where it's at. He said the recent success of BYU football, which defeated Notre Dame on Saturday, and basketball, which produced No. 1 pick AJ Dybantsa (BYU), shows that the league's members are finding success because they're investing in the product. He said he doesn't want to disrupt that.
"I tell everyone, I've got 16 kids. The only 17th kid I have is Indiana, where I went to school. But I'm happy with 16 [schools] right now. And I love them all equally," Yormark told ESPN at Big 12 media day. "They're doing a great job. And as I said earlier, it's taken us a while to get to this point. When you think about eight new schools in the last four years, there is a lot for the staff to do from when you think about integration. It's important for the board to be cohesive. I think we are. We all have a shared mission and vision, so we're happy at 16."