When Brett Yormark took over as Big 12 commissioner on Aug. 1, one of his first orders of business was to visit every campus in the conference over a six-week period. Yormark had already made three such stops before he arrived in Lubbock on Thursday, part of a day trip to visit with Texas Tech athletics personnel.
At last month’s Big 12 media days, Yormark called the campus visits “a listening tour,” during which he wants to meet with top officials, coaches and staff at every school, gain some history of each place and ask, he said, ‘What does success look like?’ “
After he’s been to all 14 current and soon-to-be Big 12 schools, Yormark plans to report back to Big 12 presidents and outline his ideas for charting a path forward.
During Yormark’s tight schedule, A-J Media was allotted five minutes to sit down with the new commissioner between his meetings. Here is a transcript of the conversation.
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A-J: You have already visited TCU, Iowa State and Kansas State, correct?
Yormark: Yes, yes, this is my fourth visit. Next week, Monday’s Kansas, Tuesday Oklahoma State, Baylor Wednesday and West Virginia on Thursday. By mid-September, I will have visited all the campuses, which I’m really excited about. And it’s been fantastic. The welcoming has been over the top.
I’ve been able to meet all the key stakeholders, which has been great, and I will tell you that the biggest takeaway — I mean, there’s a lot of takeaways; I shouldn’t say the biggest — but one of the key takeaways has been the investment the schools are making in our student-athletes and affording them every resource possible so that they’re successful. I love that. I think it’s fantastic. And I bring, obviously, a professional lens to my visits, and seeing the world-class facilities, the world-class resources, the world-class coaches and the human capital that supports our student-athletes has been amazing. So, very impressed.
A-J: You said on Big 12 media day, ‘There’s no higher priority than to best position the Big 12 for its upcoming multimedia rights negotiations. Everything we do must create momentum for those negotiations.’ How do you go about that? What steps can you take to make the Big 12 more attractive in the next couple or three years? Is there a finite list of things you can do, or how do you go about that?
Yormark: I think there’s there’s many things we can do, but I think building the brand, being more national, being more relevant, connecting to youth culture, expansion. I think all of those things and more can create value for us as we head into those negotiations.
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A-J: What are your ideas on building a brand or particularly, as you said, being more national. How do you be more national?
Yormark: I think being more national means who we strategically align with, potential scheduling partnerships with other conferences, looking at some of our tentpole events and saying, do we do something more creatively with them from a location point of view? I think there’s lots of things we can do, and I’m exploring every and all option right now.
A-J: You got a lot of attention on media day for your ‘Big 12 is open for business’ comment. How has that been received?
Yormark: It’s been received, I think, in a very positive way. ‘Open for business’ doesn’t mean just expansion, where I think some people read into it that it was very much focused on expansion. That’s not necessarily the case. When I say ‘open for business’, it means that this conference is no longer going to be stagnant. We’re going to be very proactive. We’re going to explore and identify any and all opportunities that create value in every respect. Is expansion a part of ‘open for business’? A hundred percent. But it’s only a small piece.
A-J: Which kind of leads into my next question. Five years from now, after every power-five conference except perhaps the ACC has had another round of multimedia rights negotiations, what do you think college athletics will look like in terms of conference configuration if we’re sitting here in 2026, 2027?
Yormark: I don’t have a crystal ball for that. But if you’re asking where I would like to take the conference, where we would like the conference to go — listen, we want to be the most vibrant Big 12 that we can be. If that means expansion, geographically having a presence in the most important markets, that’s certainly going to play a major role in what we look like in five years. Certainly, when you think about the multimedia rights deal — and I’m very much focused on it — the ESPNs and the Foxes of the world are very important partners to us, giving us the broadest reach possible, especially when you think about being national and relevant.
Obviously, a digital partner makes sense because the young consumer today, you need to reach differently. But being with an ESPN and a Fox and a broad-based distributor is going to be very much part of our future and hopefully in five years from now, post our next TV negotiation, we will be with the biggest and best distributors in the business. We hopefully at that point in time will also have experienced some further expansion, which I think is critically important for us.
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A-J: Is there an ideal number of schools you see for the Big 12? Sixteen? On principle, do you think 20 or something like that number is doable?
Yormark: I haven’t really looked at that the numbers. As I said during media day, it can’t be dilutive. It needs to be additive, and it comes down to making sure that we’re identifying the right strategic partners from a school perspective, and those that bring value to our conference. We’ll be at 12 in a couple of years when you add the four [Brigham Young, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston] and Texas and Oklahoma leave. If it’s 16 or 20 I can’t tell you, but we just have to make sure that whatever number it is, it’s all about the value equation.