MORGANTOWN — Whether you view your college basketball through the lens of a computer ranking, NBA draft picks or a media poll, there are certain facts that can’t be ignored about the Big 12.
The league has produced the last two men’s national champions in Kansas (2022) and Baylor (2021) and was a few plays away from seeing Texas Tech win it all in 2019.
Maybe now, more than ever, the Big 12 is on the top of a hill looking down at the rest of college basketball.
That thought did not escape the mind of West Virginia men’s coach Bob Huggins, who is in the midst of preparing the Mountaineers for their season-opener against Mount St. Mary’s at 7 p.m. Monday.
Being the king of college basketball is no small feat and it does not happen overnight, yet in the grand scheme of college athletics, the sport plays a distant second fiddle to that of college football.
The Big 12 is in the process of inking a six-year extension with both ESPN and Fox Sports worth more than $2 billion, with the value of that deal driven more by football than basketball.
This is where Huggins’ thoughts begin to roll, because what is so valuable one day may not always be there to carry the load down the road.
“This is going to be more a basketball league, with what’s going on,” Huggins begins. “There’s no doubt about that. That football-driving-the-train thing is slowing down and the basketball thing is just kicking up.”
Texas and Oklahoma are scheduled to leave the Big 12 on July 1, 2025, taking the bulk of the football interest in the league with them.
Replacing them are Cincinnati and Houston, two schools with much more basketball tradition, as well as UCF and BYU.
While BYU has a strong connection with football, the Cougars also have a strong basketball following and ranked 16th in the country last season in season attendance.
BYU averaged 13,855 fans over 17 homes games. The only Big 12 teams that averaged more were Kansas and Texas Tech.
Then reports surfaced Wednesday that officials at Gonzaga — a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament in four of the last five years — have had discussions with Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark about the possibilities of joining the Big 12 as a basketball-only member.
“I would think it’d be a tremendous awakening for Gonzaga,” Huggins said Thursday. “To get in this league and play who we play day after day, I think it would be a tremendous awakening.”
If you could somehow peer through a crystal ball, Huggins’ point on the Big 12’s strength in hoops would suddenly hold a lot of water with the new additions, and maybe even Gonzaga.
It would also stretch the league across all four time zones in the U.S., giving the Big 12 a prime-time presence from coast to coast.
“The basketball part of it, (Yormark) can go lure the best,” Huggins said. “That makes it pretty exciting. It looks like the football thing is going away from the league, not to the league.”
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