Report: Big 12 Talking Again with UConn About Joining Conference

The Big 12 is trying once again with potentially adding UConn to the conference. On Friday afternoon, Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger reported that UConn officials met with Big 12 athletic directors in Dallas last week.

Dellenger adds that if UConn joined 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 officials visited in-person with Big 12 ADs in Dallas last week as the school & conference remain in serious expansion negotiations, sources tell @YahooSports.

UConn would join in all sports, but FB would have a runway before full membership in 2031https://t.co/MKTvH2oQFK

— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) August 23, 2024

“We have some guiding principles when we think about expansion. It’s all strategic here,” Big 12 Commissioner Brett 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.”

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.

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.