Report: Big 12 votes unanimously to bring back CU Buffs
Jul 27, 2023, 10:06 AM
It won’t be with Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M or even Nebraska this time but the schools that are now in the Big 12 have accepted the University of Colorado back into the conference, a decade after leaving.
The report of the accepted votes came late night by ESPN on Wednesday.
The final step for the Buffaloes in switching conferences from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 comes Thursday when the school’s board of regents will vote on the move. The Buffs still have not formally applied for membership in the new conference but the move is all but inevitable now.
The exit would come after this 2023-24 season, which is also the end of the current Pac-12 TV deal. Pac-12 leadership has failed to get a new deal done. All of this means no exit fee for CU on their way out of the Pac-12.
Meanwhile, the Big 12 is in a lot healthier of a TV situation, but like the Pac-12 lost UCLA and USC, the Big 12 is losing Texas and Oklahoma.
The University of Colorado was in the Big 12 from 1996 to 2010 before departing for the Pac-12 and was traditionally in the precursor Big 8 before that.
The Buffaloes will be one of 13 teams in the conference, joining mainstays like Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa and Oklahoma State, as well as former SWC schools Texas Tech, Baylor, TCU and Houston. In the grouping too will be BYU, UCF, Cincinnati and West Virginia.
***
