Woodling: A look at future of Big 12

By Chuck Woodling     Aug 23, 2008

? You probably won’t read the following story in the year 2028, but, then again, you never know.

Big 12 Conference athletic directors adopted a rule today requiring league schools to play at least one football game on campus every season.

The ruling is aimed at preventing league schools with smaller stadiums from staging all their games at larger professional facilities in order to boost attendance and increase revenue.

Over the last few years, for example, Kansas and Kansas State have been playing the majority of their home games at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium.

Iowa State, too, has two games annually at Arrowhead and two more at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. Baylor, meanwhile, plays at least four home games every year in the 100,000-seat home of the Dallas Cowboys. And Colorado has been playing as many as three home games annually at Denver’s Ivesco Field.

Revenue disparity has been a major issue in the Big 12 Conference, with Texas, Texas A&M, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State all having built new stadiums within the last decade.

Texas started the trend in 2019 with the construction of the largest college football stadium in America on the site of the old Austin, Texas, airport. The 147,000-seat facility has been sold out ever since.

Oklahoma State was next. Using a $500 million bequest from the late T. Boone Pickens, OSU erected a 130,000-seat stadium two years later at a site approximately halfway between Stillwater and Tulsa.

Only a year after that, Oklahoma revealed a 135,000-seat structure located on Interstate 35 north of the Norman campus and only about 10 miles south of Oklahoma City.

Meanwhile, Nebraska took advantage of the rebirth of its football program after long-time coach Bo Pelini took over in 2008 to abandon no-longer expandable Memorial Stadium for 140,000-seat Osborne Family Stadium on I-80 between Lincoln and Omaha that was dedicated in 2022.

Not to be left out, Texas A&M joined the trend in 2024, when the Aggies left Kyle Field and moved into a 140,000-seat stadium south of College Station, where the Texas International Raceway was once located.

No Big 12 school made as radical a change, however, as Texas Tech. Located hours from the nearest pro football arena and lacking the resources to build a massive new stadium on campus in Lubbock, Texas Tech regents approved a merger with Rice University and moved the entire school to Houston, where the Red Owl Raiders utilize Reliant Stadium, home of the NFL Texans.

In another move, Big 12 Conference fathers approved a salary cap for league football players.

When the NCAA, bowing to pressure from the ACLU, finally conceded in 2018 that its amateur status was a sham and approved payments to student-athletes, the Big 12 left the amount of the stipend up to each school.

Some member institutions, such as Texas and Oklahoma, were paying as much as $50,000 apiece based on a student-athlete’s impact on the bottom line so the Big 12 established a cap of $30,000 per player.

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