Neal Brown impressed by Brett Yormark after latest round of Big 12 expansion

West Virginia football coach Neal Brown commends Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark for how he has navigated conference expansion. When Yormark took over the role a little more than a year ago, he inherited a conference that had been dealt a major blow with Oklahoma and Texas set to depart for the SEC.

Fast forward to now and the Big 12 is in perhaps the most secure position of any of the major conferences outside of the Big Ten and SEC. The league came out a major winner in the most recent wave of expansion this past week, adding Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah from the Pac-12 for the 2024 season.

With BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF already set to enter their first of Big 12 play this season, the conference has not only managed to survive the OU and Texas exit, but set itself up favorably for the future. Brown believes the credit for that goes to both Yormark and his predecessor, Bob Bowlsby.

“I’ve been really impressed with commissioner Yormark since he took over,” the coach said. “I think he’s been really aggressive. I don’t think enough credit goes to commissioner Bowlsby, too. The conference, by his leadership, reacted really quickly and we added four really good football programs to the Big 12 when Texas and Oklahoma initially left. Then commissioner Yormark’s had a plan since the beginning.

“Now we’re sitting at 16 teams. I think for the last several months we’ve been in a position of power, which has not always been the case. So I think a lot of credit goes to his leadership.”

Had Bowslby not acted so quickly, the Big 12 could have found itself in the spot the Pac-12 is currently in. With eight of its 12 members set to leave by next season, the conference, at least as we knew it, is all but dead going forward.

Yormark previously said that negotiating a new TV deal within the first month of taking over as commissioner helped give the Big 12 “a voice” in expansion talks. He inked a six-year extension with ESPN and FOX through 2031, ensuring that the conference will make $380 million annually. That’s a big part of what attracted to Colorado, and once that domino fell, other schools were quick to follow.

All the change will certainly take some getting used to, just as it did when West Virginia joined the Big 12 from the Big East in 2012. But thanks to Yormark’s quick action, the conference will have a seat at the table heading into this new era of college sports.