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Brett Yormark’s Hoop Dreams

In a football world, the Big 12 commissioner has made basketball a large focus of his efforts to keep his conference competitive with its Power Four peers. Now that the undervaluing of college basketball is a fashionable talking point, maybe he was onto something.

Brett Yormark
"I can’t remember when any conference in America has had that kind of distribution and that kind of marketing, promotion, and storytelling, which is so critically important for us. Our Monday nights, Big Monday, on ESPN have been [great] for us. That window alone is averaging a 117 percent increase per game from last season," says Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark. Photo: Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
John Ourand
March 2, 2026

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The Big 12 conference’s six-year, $2.2 billion media rights agreement with ESPN and Fox, in 2025, was largely predicated on football. What else? Sure, the conference that bled Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC doesn’t quite have the powerhouses its peers do—Texas Tech can’t exactly qualify as a blue blood despite a trip to the CFP as a four-seed, even with all that Cody Campbell money—but college football remains the third-largest asset class in modern media, short of only the NFL and NBA. In fact, multiple sources across the industry have told me that networks routinely assign 90 percent or more of a conference’s media rights fees to football, with basketball accounting for 10 percent.