The Big 12 Conference is a safe bet for college basketball, and the league is banking on its reputation to assume 10 NCAA Tournament bids beginning with the 2026-27 season. A new story by Matt Norlander at CBS breaks down the situation, including an excerpt from a Big 12 associate who expects the conference to be hitting “double digits” annually.
Basketball returns in just a few months, and the Big 12 – which features stardom again in the form of Arizona center Motiejus Krivas, Texas Tech frontcourt general JT Toppin and incoming Kansas freshman shooter Tyran Stokes – is positioning itself for a historic haul entering the NCAA Tournament.
Brian Thornton is the Big 12’s associate commissioner to Brett Yormark, as well as the league’s chief basketball officer overseeing the league’s basketball operations and national presence as of April 2026 after multiple years working around the Big 12 and another stint in the Western Athletic Conference.
In his interview with Norlander, Thornton touched on a handful of topics, including the Big 12’s place among a 76-team NCAA Tournament field, which takes shape next year with March Madness.
Of the Big 12, Thornton described the following expectations moving forward in the new college hoops landscape:
“We’ve done a nice job and had eight teams in the tournament [two of the last three years], but with additional teams participating, we want to be hitting double digits annually,” Thornton told CBS Sports. “To do that, we will have to increase the size of our bubble.”
There are eight new seats available across college basketball this season, and everyone’s going to want their hands on them.
It’s understandable that the Big 12 is eyeing at least two of them. The league slotted eight teams – a number its never passed – with West Virginia, Cincinnati and UCF resting on the bubble. Outside the league, programs like Oklahoma and New Mexico felt they were snubbed from the tournament field albeit coming from two very different basketball conferences.
