Texas and Oklahoma’s path to the SEC in 2024 has been cleared.
The Longhorns and Sooners have finalized an agreement with the Big 12, as well as its television partners, to exit the league one year earlier than scheduled, sources tell Sports Illustrated. Under the agreement, the schools would join the SEC in July 2024, in time to participate in the ’24 football season.
The agreement ends several months of discussions for an early separation and comes just days after negotiation snags seemed to trigger reports of an altogether end to talks—something refuted to SI by multiple sources last week. Turns out, the parties—specifically networks ESPN and Fox—restarted negotiations soon after the latest hitch and were steered toward a compromise by self-proclaimed dealmaker Brett Yormark, the brash Big 12 commissioner who seven months into his tenure has scored a lucrative victory for his legacy schools.
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As part of the exit agreement, the Longhorns and Sooners will owe a combined $100 million to the conference, much of which will be distributed to the eight Big 12 legacy universities to offset an expected decrease in their 2024 conference revenue. The $100 million will be a deduction from their yearly distribution over the next two years. Details of any Fox and ESPN agreement were unclear, but Fox is expected to receive additional inventory or compensation for the loss of the two schools in ’24.
The networks were at the center of the last hurdle to reaching a truce. Fox stood to lose the most from Texas and OU’s early exit. While ESPN owns exclusive rights to the SEC starting with the 2024 season, Fox would lose the rights of the two football giants for that season—an absence of six to eight games involving the teams.
Officials with knowledge of the negotiations described the Fox situation as the missing piece to any agreement. The network, which shares Big 12 broadcasting rights with ESPN, was seeking to receive a multimillion-dollar financial package and/or additional inventory to be made whole.
An inventory trade of some sort—Fox gets a game or games that ESPN would own—was an option during the latest talks. That would include offerings like nonconference games involving the schools, such as Texas’s scheduled series against Michigan and Ohio State, as well as Oklahoma scheduling games against Big 12 schools.
The other party in this agreement—the SEC—has been expecting the pair’s arrival in 2024 for several weeks now. Starting in November, momentum began to build over an agreement between the eight legacy Big 12 schools and the two SEC-bound bluebloods to split before the original date of July 2025.
“They want to go, and we want them to go,” one Big 12 official described it recently. Their entrance into the SEC is a boon for what is already the most successful conference in college football. Commissioner Greg Sankey’s league swells to 16 members at an ideal time, adding two blueblood powers in the same year that (1) the College Football Playoff expands to 12 teams; (2) the Big Ten adds USC and UCLA; and (3) ESPN takes over as the league’s sole broadcaster.
Texas and Oklahoma are expected to receive a share of distribution from the ESPN TV deal in 2024, but the amount is uncertain. They are unlikely to receive the full amount as other SEC programs, a source tells SI. SEC schools expect to eventually pull in more than $70 million in conference distribution by the end of the backloaded agreement.
SEC athletic directors met last week in New Orleans for their annual winter gathering. Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte and Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione were in attendance. For nearly a year now, the league has been attempting to finalize a new future scheduling format, an ordeal complicated by the uncertainty of Texas’s and Oklahoma’s arrivals. With that now set, administrators are expected to determine a format this spring. They’ll meet again in March in Florida.
While many administrators are now leaning to move to a division-less, nine-game conference schedule, additional revenue from ESPN is a missing piece in that decision. With more inventory—an extra league game—the conference wants more cash. In the nine-game format, each team would play three permanent opponents and a rotation of six others, assuring that each member would meet every team in the league twice in a four-year cycle—once at home and once away.
Meanwhile, the Big 12 and Yormark can now move on to focus on the league’s future. The conference has aggressively courted multiple Pac-12 schools, as well as Gonzaga, in a bid to further expand. Yormark, a New York businessman who comes from the entertainment industry, has introduced progressive and sweeping proposals at rebranding the conference.
In the short term, the exit agreement accomplishes the all-important goal of making his conference members whole. Texas’s and Oklahoma’s penalty fee will negate a decrease in annual conference revenue for the eight legacy members that was expected in 2024.
Despite the four new members (UCF, Houston, Cincinnati and BYU) taking a smaller distribution cut in 2023 and in ’24—about $18 million each year—the eight schools were expected to see at least a one-year reduction of $5 million to $8 million in ’24 before the league’s new TV deal begins in ’25. Carving up the conference money pie into more pieces—the additional members—is behind the decrease.
However, the penalty fee will make up for the losses. In many ways, all parties emerged benefiting from negotiations.
“It’s a win-win-win,” one Big 12 official describes the agreement. Well, sort of.
The Big 12 handed Texas and Oklahoma quite the parting gifts in their last conference schedule in the league in 2023:
- Texas is playing at Houston and plays at Iowa State in late November
- Oklahoma plays three of the four new members, including two on the road, and that includes a game at BYU in mid-November.
As of Tuesday, the schools had not posted the league schedules on their websites—an unusual occurrence that speaks to the animosity between the Big 12 and their departing members. While everyone's mostly remained professional publicly, Texas’s and Oklahoma’s impending departures has created awkward private moments and a lingering consternation among the parties. That grew with the announcement of the four new members.
It got even more contentious when the Big 12 announced that those schools would join the league earlier than expected, in 2023. The start date meant that the Longhorns and Sooners would have competed against them for not just one season but two. That did not go over well in Austin or in Norman. Though it mattered not to the result, Texas and Oklahoma did not cast votes to add the four schools.
