Report: Big 12 moving 2024 media days to Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas

The Big 12 media days will be moving to a new location in 2024 as the conference is set to expand to 16 teams. Dave Campbell’s Texas Football reported Monday that the event will be held at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on July 9 and 10.

Fresh off hosting the Super Bowl, the arena will now help usher the Big 12 into a new era.

The 2024 Big 12 media days will be the first without Oklahoma and Texas, which are off to join the SEC. It will also mark the arrival Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah from the Pac-12. BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF joined the conference in 2023.

The Big 12 media days had previously been held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington but had to be moved due to scheduling conflicts. The 2025 media days will also be held in Las Vegas.

As the conference moves forward without the Sooners and Longhorns, it expands its geographical reach west with the additions of the Pac-12 programs. That being the case, Vegas seems a fitting location for the new-look Big 12 to host its first media days as a 16-team league.

The future of the conference looks bright after commissioner Brett Yormark secured a new media rights deal with ESPN and FOX through 2031. The contract is worth a total $2.28 billion with payouts of $31.7 million per school beginning in 2025. That is the third-largest media rights deal of any of the major conference behind only the Big Ten and SEC.

As college football is set to undergo major changes in 2024 with realignment and the expansion of the College Football Playoff, the Big 12 is prepared for the long haul.

Brett Yormark claims Big 12 is ‘cemented at No. 3’ among conferences

When talking about conference rankings, the SEC and Big Ten typically top the list. But Yormark thinks he put the Big 12 right behind them, he declared during a Friday press conference.

“We are cemented at No. 3 and moving up,” Yormark said in September.

For comparison, the Big Ten will have 18 schools starting next year and as of Friday, so will the ACC. Cal, Stanford and SMU are all coming aboard to make it an 18-team league in all sports except football. It’s all part of the shifting college athletics landscape, which noticeably sees the Pac-12 crumble.

But not everyone agrees with Brett Yormark’s assessment of the conference rankings. SMU’s board chairman declared the ACC the No. 3 league in the country while celebrating the Mustangs’ big move from the AAC after this year.

“Here we are today, a new member of one of the top three — remember what I said, one of the top three — collegiate athletic conferences in the United States,” he said.