With OU and Texas on way out, Big 12 has a branding problem

There’s a big game this week. It’s called the Super Bowl, and the NFL has been playing it for 56 years.

The game predates the formation of the Big 12 Conference by 28 years. By comparison, Patrick Mahomes is only 27. Jalen Hurts is 24.

Mahomes and Hurts will be the first Black starting quarterbacks to face off in the Super Bowl, which is historic. Less important, but still notable, is the news that they’ll also be the first pair of Big 12 quarterbacks to face off in the Big Game.

In fact, until Mahomes won his first playoff game in 2018 and began a run of success that will now include a third Super Bowl appearance, no Big 12 quarterback had ever won a game beyond the wild-card round. Not Baker Mayfield nor Geno Smith. Not Brock Purdy nor Skylar Thompson. Not even Vince Young, Robert Griffin III, Kyler Murray nor Sam Bradford.

Yet despite having produced Mahomes and Hurts, the Big 12 is hardly a lock to have a national championship contender next season. It's competitive but lacks giants, and with Oklahoma and Texas on the way out, it doesn’t look like it will produce one soon. That isn’t a problem money can fix, and, as much as it pains 12 of the 14 members in 2023, OU and Texas being good would be great for the brand.

Can OU or Texas be the Big 12’s biggest brand in 2023?

Yes, it’s possible. Both put together outstanding recruiting classes, return their starting quarterbacks and have head coaches who have won national titles as assistants. 

But it’s going to be a steep climb in a league that features just three teams that haven’t made a New Year’s Six Bowl appearance in the College Football Playoff era: Kansas, Texas Tech and West Virginia.

When the Big 12 was first formed in 1995, it was an assortment of Big 8 and Southwest Conference schools prepared to usher a new age of college football into the 21st century.

It quickly created a product that was both nationally recognized and remarkably talented. By 2001, the conference had produced a Heisman winner (Texas running back Ricky Williams) and a national champion (Bob Stoops’ Oklahoma).

However, with the dominance of USC from 2003 to 2006, and then the resurgence of the mighty SEC in 2006, the Big 12 failed to consistently produce a football team that could compete for a national title outside of Oklahoma and Texas.

After winning the program’s seventh national title in 2000, Oklahoma was beaten in its next three championship game appearances — by Nick Saban and LSU in 2004, by USC in 2005, and by Florida in 2008. It hasn’t played in a national title game since.

Texas picked up the mantle, if only for a short time, when Mack Brown and Young led the Longhorns to upset win against Pete Carroll, Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush in 2005, claiming the program’s only national title since 1981.

Since then, the Big 12 has seen Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri and Texas A&M all leave for other conferences while adding West Virginia and TCU.

Oklahoma has been tasked with being the Big 12's best program, while Texas has remained its most moneyed and talented. On July 21, 2021, that changed, too.

That's when OU and Texas jointly announced they planned to leave the Big 12 for the SEC. After the shock of the announcement, the natural follow-up was when they’d leave, and who would be tapped to replace the league's two most important and lucrative properties.

Along with a change at commissioner — Bob Bowlsby choosing to step down and Brett Yormark stepping in — the conference chose to add four new schools: BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida each announced their intention to join the Big 12 in 2023.

Now that OU and Texas have reached an agreement to leave the Big 12 following the upcoming season — one season earlier than originally planned — the Sooners and Longhorns will have only one chance to rule a Big 12 that will feature 14 teams for the first (and only) time.

For nearly 25 years, the bar for success in the Big 12 has been Oklahoma. But in 2021, the program lost its most important coach — Lincoln Riley — to USC and the Pac-12, and the Sooners suffered in the transition from Riley to Brent Venables. Venables, who led OU to its first losing season since the 20th century, could only watch as Kansas State marched over his Sooners to a Big 12 title, and while TCU reached the national championship game with a first-year coach in Sonny Dykes.

But the Sooners put together a remarkable 2023 recruiting class in which they outplayed Notre Dame and Oregon for safety Peyton Bowen, while also nabbing quarterback Jackson Arnold, the first National Gatorade Player of the Year to wear an OU jersey since Murray.

With one year left in the Big 12, Venables has to right his ship before jumping into the teeth of the SEC.

Is Texas ever going to fulfill its promise?

Texas has put together yet another top-five recruiting class. That makes five in six years. All the Longhorns have to show for it is an Alamo Bowl win against Karl Dorrell’s Colorado and a moral victory against Alabama — which is a loss where it counts — in front of a sellout crowd.

No program has done less with more outside of perhaps Texas A&M, which makes no sense as those are two of the richest programs in the sport. So, no, I ain’t gonna say Texas is back, mostly because I like to be right.

And there’s little to show I’d be right about anything wearing burnt orange in Austin outside a barbecue pit. And, yes, they make damn fine barbecue in Austin.

The Longhorns finished with a winning record in Year 2 of the Steve Sarkisian era, but were embarrassed at home by TCU. Without Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson in the backfield in 2023, Sarkisian needs to identify yet another tailback capable of handling the workload.

As much as he’s earned a reputation for QB development, when Sarkisian’s offenses have been good he’s always had a 1,000-yard rusher. If the Longhorns fail to identify that player, attention paid to returning starting quarterback Quinn Ewers will simply ratchet up, especially given that Arch Manning — perhaps the most famous 2023 freshman in the sport — is lingering on the depth chart.

I don’t expect Manning to compete for the starting job in 2023, but Ewers will have the most to say about that. When he’s good, he looks like the kind of quarterback capable of beating Alabama. He was injured in that game against Alabama last year, one the Longhorns lost by a point. Had Bert Auburn made a chip-shot field goal before halftime on the Forty Acres, the Longhorns might have won that game.

Many thought Ewers might be the best quarterback in the conference. But it was clear by October that the honor belonged to a player who began Week 1 as a backup at TCU, Max Duggan.

Which team is the future of the Big 12?

If we’re to believe Dykes’ decision-making and not what he’s said, Chandler Morris has been the best quarterback on campus at TCU since August. Had Morris not been injured in the Horned Frogs’ season-opener against Colorado, we could be talking about him as a Heisman finalist and not Duggan.

Dykes and TCU didn’t just run the regular-season table for the first time since 2010, they’d convinced enough of the suits who pick the four semifinalists for the CFP that the Horned Frogs should get in even after losing the conference title game to K-State.

I don’t know that Oklahoma, who has felt like the best of the rest in at least two of its three CFP appearances, would have been extended the same courtesy. But TCU was new blood in a format where that has often been difficult to find. Perhaps, the Horned Frogs were also indicative of what the Big 12 would be absent OU and Texas.

Following TCU’s win against Big Ten champion Michigan, that felt true. Then the Horned Frogs took the worst beating in bowl history, 65-7, to Georgia.

In 60 minutes — less if you saw the score at halftime — the narrative had turned from "Is TCU that good?" to "How could Michigan lose to that TCU team?"

Both questions remain valid in 2023.

TCU became the first Big 12 program to run the regular season undefeated since 2009 Texas. 

Newcomers Cincy and UCF have also had great runs of late, and BYU is a program with some history, but none of these carry the kind of weight to overwhelm an SEC foe.

So perhaps that’s where the Big 12 is in 2023, nowhere near competitive with the SEC’s best, but capable of beating the Big Ten champ — or ACC or Pac-12 for that matter. That’s good news for the Big 12, who some thought might fold immediately following OU and Texas’ decision to leave.

While the Big 12 is still trying to figure out its scheduling model upon OU and Texas’ eventual exit, the league office was not subtle about how it built its conference schedules this season.

Texas plays at Houston and at Iowa State in November. The Longhorns have looked down on Houston for decades, playing the Cougars just three times since 2000 and never away from the Forty Acres. That changes in 2023.

Oklahoma plays three of the four new members, including two on the road and one against BYU on Nov. 18, and a Friday night game in Fort Worth on Nov. 24.

If it feels like the Big 12 and its members are giving OU and Texas a swift kick in the pants on their way out the door, consider that neither OU nor Texas were invited to vote on whether the conference should add its four new members. It also plans to hold OU and Texas to the 99-year agreement it signed in 2012 — a pledge that comes with a heavy financial penalty. This is in addition to just how much money the Big 12 would demand for an early exit.

People remember how you make them feel, and it’s clear that at least eight of the 12 other members feel some kind of way about OU and Texas. The other four should probably get with the program because the remaining schools will determine just what and who the Big 12 is going to become.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The Number One College Football Show." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube.

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