Big 12’s Brett Yormark Releases Statement About UConn

For the past couple of weeks, conversations between the Big 12 and UConn picked up once again regarding conference expansion. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark released a statement on Thursday afternoon regarding the potential addition of the Huskies.

Yormark states that the Big 12 will “pause” their conversations with UConn once more.

“As Commissioner, it is my responsibility to explore a variety of value-creating opportunities on behalf of the Big 12. Following detailed discussions with my conference colleagues alongside UConn leadership, we have jointly decided to pause our conversations at this time. We will instead focus our attention and resources to ushering in this new era of college athletics,” Yormark said.

Since taking over as commissioner in 2022, Yormark has added Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah to the conference while welcoming BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF from Bob Bowlsby’s last year as commish.

“We have some guiding principles when we think about expansion. It’s all strategic here,” Yormark said in June 2023. “At the top is the academic alignment and the leadership and the cultural fit and the geography and the athletic performance and the upside that a potential institution has potentially joining the Big 12. We think about all of those things as a collective group. And we discussed all those guiding principles this week.”

Yormark has been very high about adding basketball-only schools to the Big 12. Before becoming commissioner in 2022, Yormark served as the Brooklyn Nets CEO for 14 years. The original report was if UConn did join the Big 12, that it would be for all sports. Every sport except football would join the conference as early as 2026 and football would join in 2031.

UConn recently made the move back to the Big East after being held back in the AAC until 2019. The men’s basketball program has seen a resurgence behind head coach Dan Hurley. In April, Hurley led UConn to back-to-back National Championships, the school’s sixth overall. Now the Huskies will remain in the Big East in the meantime.