Gonzaga, Big 12 resume 'high-level' conference expansion talks

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark pitched Gonzaga's inclusion as soon as 2024-25 to conference officials

Gonzaga and the Big 12 have resumed discussions about the possibility of the school joining the conference as early as 2024, according to a report from The Messenger. 

After publicly shutting down expansion talks involving Gonzaga in August, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark revisited the topic when he made a pitch during separate sessions with the league's athletic directors and presidents last week in Dallas. The proposal reportedly took some of the attendees by surprise after the conference added Arizona, Arizona State and Utah over the summer, as well as Colorado, which decided to leave the Pac-12 for the Big 12 in July.

The Messenger reported that Yormark’s "best-case scenario" would be for Gonzaga to join the Big 12 by the start of the 2024-25 season. The league's schools would have to sort out the logistics of scheduling and how the conference tournament will be formatted with 17 schools to account for Gonzaga. Not to mention the financial impacts that came with the additions of Cincinnati, BYU and UCF.

Yormark received permission from the Big 12 to continue talks with the Bulldogs, including an option that would bring the school on board in 2025. The Messenger reported that despite earlier negotiations with UConn, there is no current dialogue between Yormark and the Huskies.

The idea of Gonzaga leaving the West Coast Conference for the Power 5 conference is nothing new, though serious headway was made last fall when athletic director Chris Standiford met with Yormark in Frisco, Texas while the Zags were in Dallas for a scrimmage against Tennessee. There was "mutual growing interest" for the Bulldogs to join the Big 12 when the two sides met weeks later in November, according to Bleacher Report.

Despite Yormark’s desire to grow the league as a basketball powerhouse, his member schools pushed back on the idea of a non-football school joining the conference back in June. 

The conference brought up the notion of Gonzaga's inclusion with its television partners while negotiating a six-year contract extension with ESPN and Fox worth more than $2 billion. However, the contract stated that if the Big 12 were to expand and add a non-Power 5 school, the payout per school would decrease for the league's current members. If schools weren't willing to share a larger slice of the pie, another possibility involved the conference allocating $100 million in combined exit fees from Oklahoma and Texas leaving for the SEC next season.

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