Big 12 has no expansion plans; football title game history

The Big 12 football title game featured several memorable moments, from Texas' upset of Nebraska in the inaugural to last year's controversial victory by Texas over Nebraska.

Now, it appears, it's over when Nebraska exits the league after this season.

With 10 teams and a nine-game round-robin schedule, the football title game likely is history, Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebe conceded Tuesday. The league will forfeit more than $11 million by not staging the game, according to its 2008 federal tax return, but it won't lose any television revenue.

"As far as a championship game, we can petition and all of our colleagues would support having less than 12 members and still having a championship," Beebe said. "I'm not sure if we're going to do that or not.

"There's a lot of benefits to having a nine-game schedule. Scheduling out to that weekend in December where you can get a lot of exposure and then also not having the potential to knock off a team headed to the national championship in the championship game. Those things will still be considered. We'll have meetings coming up to decide how we're going to structure it."

At the Big 12 meetings in Kansas City two weeks ago, Beebe told reporters 12 was the "optimum" number for the league and he wouldn't rule out expansion. Tuesday, expansion seemed unlikely.

"The 12 we had was an ideal number," he said. "The 10 we have as we look at it, now that we have it, there are a lot of positive feelings about having 10.

"I think as we've talked about this after the departures of the two members, my statement about 12 is more about not going bigger than 12, but now that we're at 10 there's been a lot of positive reaction to that and we're not looking to expand at all and certainly we wouldn't look to expand with any institutions that are in our geographic five-state area now. We're very comfortable with where we are, there's no interest in having an expansion at this point, and I don't think it's going to come in the future."

The league also will institute a true round-robin, 18-game league basketball schedule. With Colorado and Nebraska heading to the Pac-10 and Big Ten, respectively, the new-look league could have the best basketball conference in college athletics. The Big 12's previous basketball schedule featured 16 games, two against sectional foes and one game against opposite sectional opponents.

"Everybody gets a chance to see the great basketball teams come to their arena every year," Beebe said.