While conversations about which conference is best for collegiate basketball have been essentially wrapped up for the last few years now, CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein provided his take on Tuesday.
With the announcement that CBS Sports will broadcast 26 Big 12 Basketball games in the 2024-25 season, Rothstein noted that the Big 12 is without a doubt the nation’s best basketball conference.
“The addition of the Big 12, college basketball’s best conference, makes 2024-25 unequivocally the biggest season in the history of CBS Sports Network,” Rothstein said. “Onward and Upward!”
The Big 12 Conference, commonly referred to as the best basketball league in America, hired an incredible individual as league commissioner with a major background in basketball. After facilitating multiple deals and wearing various hats as an NBA executive, Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark brought that same approach to strengthening the Big 12’s basketball product.
While losing Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC carries significantly less weight in football than it did in basketball, former commissioner Bob Bowlsby brought in four schools with impressive basketball history through conference expansion with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF.
Yormark then followed that up by bringing in more impressive basketball programs the following season with the “Four Corner” schools, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah.
The additions helped stretch the Big 12’s lead over other college basketball conferences, and the results can be seen in the Preseason edition of the AP Top 25 for 2024-25. Five teams from the Big 12 earned spots inside the Top 10, which is the first team ever for a conference to claim half of the Top 10 spots in the poll.
While other leagues hope to try and combat the impressive work done by Brett Yormark since his hiring, Big 12 Basketball continues to make waves ahead of the pack as the nation’s premier college basketball conference.
