14-team Big 12 will yield one odd year of scheduling

Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark speaks to the media during Big 12 NCAA college basketball media day Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

The Big 12 Conference has for years neither been especially big nor contained 12 schools. From 2012 until now it survived with just 10, a number that made it one of the smallest leagues in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

As a result of a move nearly two years in the making, however, it will spend one season among the biggest. With BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF joining the league Saturday – a year before Oklahoma and Texas bolt for the Southeastern Conference, and UCLA and USC leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, reshaping the college athletics ecosystem as we know it – the Big 12 will spend one ephemeral academic year with a robust 14-school membership, exceeding its eponymous number for the first time in its history.

The conference will have to employ a variety of less conventional scheduling formulas for one season as it grows four schools larger while maintaining a similar number of league games.

In the fall, the conference slate for football stays at nine games, a holdover from the 10-team era, meaning that Kansas does not play Baylor, Houston, TCU or West Virginia this year. Other sports will feature a slight increase in league obligations: KU soccer will bump up to 10 conference games this year from nine last fall and still miss BYU, Cincinnati and Texas Tech. Volleyball is also due for this sort of uptick, from 16 to 18 games, as the Jayhawks play six teams twice and six teams once, which is actually a handy way to cover all possible opponents given that Oklahoma State surprisingly does not have a volleyball team.

Basketball schedules haven’t been released yet, but all indications so far are that, in the vein of volleyball, each team will play some opponents twice and some once while maintaining an 18-game conference slate. Of course, this doesn’t work out neatly (or really at all) with 13 total conference foes. We do know that each team is expected to have a protected rival that they are guaranteed to play twice, e.g. Kansas State for KU, which will likely persist into the 12-team era in 2024-25 and beyond. (That era might be complicated, however, by Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark’s recent suggestion that basketball teams could play additional “second games” against conference foes they’re only slated to take on once, which would not count in the league standings, as part of programs like the Big 12 Mexico initiative.)

Swimming and diving will see one of the biggest proportional increases to its membership but hasn’t been very reliant on conference dual meets for scheduling in the past; golf will only have to deal with a somewhat larger field at its match play tournament. In the spring, it’s not clear yet how tennis will adapt, but it could end up looking similar to football. The math works out fine for baseball and softball, which play a fixed number of three-game conference series every year — eight for baseball, six for softball — and will just have to rotate a few more opponents through those parameters.

Other sports that Kansas doesn’t sponsor will likely be even less affected by the expansion. None of the four new members sponsor equestrian or wrestling, and the Big 12 is an entirely different conference in those sports anyway (in wrestling, it includes Air Force, Cal Baptist, Missouri, North Dakota State, Northern Iowa, South Dakota State, Utah Valley and Wyoming).

The upcoming term will feature a lot of scheduling legwork to concoct a cohesive calendar for one single year of 14-team competition. When the Big 12 slips back into a familiar pre-2011 12-team model next year, it’ll be interesting to see which logistical changes from the intervening 13 years of competition stick around.