Brett Yormark Says Big 12 Football Schedule ‘Exactly Where it Needed to Land’
ARLINGTON, Texas — Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark is aware that you cannot please everyone when it comes to the league’s future football schedules.
But when asked directly why eight of the league’s teams will have protected rivalry games and eight won’t, his answer was short but didn’t provide much more clarity beyond what was already known.
“(Big 12 vice president of football) Scott Draper led the charge in our scheduling,” Yormark said ahead of Saturday’s Big 12 Championship Game. “We created a committee and athletic directors weighed in on what it would look like. I think we landed in a wonderful spot. I was very pleased with it. It was a collaborative effort. And we’ll see how it unfolds. But I think it was exactly where we needed to land.”
The Big 12 Conference has announced its 16-team scheduling matrix for the next four football seasons last month, which sets the league’s slate from 2024-27.
For the first time since the 10-team era of the Big 12, the league has a multi-year football opponent format, the result of the expansion of the league. Naturally, not every team will be able to play every other team, as in the former round-robin format.
During the four-year span, all teams will play one another at least once home and away. Additionally, some matchups will occur over three seasons while others take place in all four. Matchups in 2024 that were also played in 2023 will not repeat at the same site.
The most controversial part of the schedule was the fact that the league only protected four rivalry games — Baylor vs. TCU, Kansas vs. Kansas State, BYU vs. Utah and Arizona vs. Arizona State.
Half of the league’s teams don’t have a protected game. For instance, Cincinnati and West Virginia — who became rivals while they were in the Big East — won’t play each other every year. Additionally, the “Farmageddon” rivalry between Iowa State and Kansas State will be played in the first three years of the new format, but not in 2027.
That would end one of the longest continuous rivalries in college football, and a game that just did a 3.29 rating last Saturday. The rating beat out every other Big 12 game.
The Conference looked to maintain the current 5/4, 4/5 home/away rotation for all 16 members to minimize non-conference scheduling disruptions. Other important factors were balancing annual travel by distance and time zones as well as maintaining connectivity to rivalries without compromising a balanced rotation for all teams.
Yormark and Draper said that the league hopes to have the full 2024 schedule, with dates, out by the first of the year. But Draper said they were committed to get the schedule right before it was released.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard.
