This upcoming season will be the first for a new look Big-XII featuring the addition of Cincinnati, Houston, UCF, and BYU. It will also be the one-and-only season where those teams will play conference games alongside Oklahoma and Texas before the Sooners and Longhorns depart for the SEC on July 1, 2024.
Media deals are the major driving force behind conference realignment, and the fledgling Pac-12 is now negotiating its next media deal. Those negotiations are reportedly not going well. A couple weeks ago, our SB Nation colleague Joseph Acosta noted that ESPN dropped out of those negotiations and Acosta astutely hypothesized that the Pac-12 is screwed.