It’s time for the Big 12 to live up to its name.

The presidents and chancellors of the conference schools, including the University of Kansas, have asked commissioner Bob Bowlsby to vet schools for possible expansion. There’s no official decision on whether to expand and no timetable, but it certainly seems headed in that direction. Analysts believe a decision will be made by October and that schools could be added in time for the 2017 football season.

There is no shortage of eager candidates. Just about every team in the American Athletic Conference — Houston, Cincinnati, UConn, Memphis, South Florida, Central Florida and Tulane — is frequently mentioned. East Carolina is openly campaigning for a spot. Brigham Young and Colorado State are said to be targets. There are even those, including Kansas State football coach Bill Snyder, who think former Big 12 members Colorado and Nebraska should come back.

Expansion could be good for KU, so long as it’s done in a deliberate fashion and that the schools recruited for membership enhance the conference in terms of exposure, revenue and sustainability. That is best accomplished by adding no more than two schools to the conference.

Two schools would bring the total to 12. It may seem like a small thing, but having 10 teams in a conference named the Big 12 seems as silly as having 14 teams in a conference called the Big 10. This is the time to get the name right.

The driving force behind expansion is football, specifically a Big 12 championship game. The Big 12 has tried touting its “one true champion” theme — built around the league’s round-robin format in which every team plays every other team and a single champion is crowned. But when two teams finish tied at the top, as was the case with Baylor and TCU in 2014, the reality is the Big 12 has no true champion and thus no shot at the lucrative college football playoff. That means millions in lost revenue.

Adding two teams would allow the conference to split into two divisions of six with a championship game in football. Such a game means significant TV money, and would allow the Big 12 to keep pace with the other power conferences. A 12-team conference offers the best statistical model for any conference to get into the college football playoff, a study by Navigate Research, a national sports and entertainment research firm, showed. In basketball, a 12-team conference with two divisions would allow KU basketball to play 16 conference games, creating greater nonconference flexibility that could mean more games at Allen Fieldhouse.

Adding more than two teams to the league would likely wipe out any new revenue gains because the revenue would be divided among more schools. Two is the right number — make the Big 12 the Big 12.