On media: Brett Yormark, Big 12 basketball and a strategic play for the streaming age
The day between Houston’s stunning victory over Duke and the Cougars’ devastating loss to Florida, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark appeared on the CBS Sports set from the Final Four in San Antonio. He addressed the chaotic state of college sports (“progress is coming”), his busy schedule (“sleep is overrated”), the impact of realignment (“our conference has gotten stronger”) and the potential for expansion (“I love the makeup of the conference”).
The comments were straight from the Commissioner Talking Points 101 handbook. It was easy to envision Yormark’s colleagues in the ACC, Big Ten and SEC uttering similar, if not identical, responses.
But when the topic turned to the value of college basketball, Yormark went where no power conference commissioner has gone before — to a strategic space he alone has inhabited since taking charge of the Big 12 in the summer of 2022.
“I understand what football means in the landscape of collegiate athletics, and it’s at the center, for sure,” Yormark told CBS. “But basketball matters. I said it when I got here, and I’ll continue to double down.”
Basketball is top-of-mind for Yormark on a daily basis. It played an important role in his expansion push in 2023, particularly with Arizona’s rich tradition. It spurred him to consider Connecticut and Gonzaga, as well. And it will play a critical role when the Big 12 heads to market in five years to negotiate a new media rights contract.
“Basketball’s undervalued in this ecosystem,” Yormark, a former executive with the New Jersey Nets, explained to CBS. “And right now, it’s providing an incredible lift for our profile and narrative, and it will continue to do so in the future.”
The ecosystem of which Yormark speaks typically assigns to basketball 20 cents of every dollar spent on college sports media rights, with football gobbling the rest. For some conferences, and some networks, the numbers might shift slightly toward football. In other cases, basketball might account for a few extra cents.
Yormark seemingly looks at the same numbers and envisions a different formula entirely, with basketball worth substantially more than 20 cents. The increase doesn’t come at football’s expense. Instead, he sees the intrinsic value of Big 12 football and basketball content as eventually exceeding $1 in the media marketplace, with the latter having greater upside relative to its current valuation.
His goal: Position the conference to tap into that unrealized potential by the time 2030 arrives.
And the data — both specific to the Big 12 and broadly across the sport — suggests Yormark could be on the right side of history:
— Big 12 schools have played for the national championship three times in the past five years, with Baylor (2021) and Kansas (2022) winning the title and Houston coming one possession from the trophy earlier this month.
— The conference earned 2.9 NCAA units per participant in the 2025 tournament, its highest total of the decade and the best of any power conference this season. (Every game played equals one unit, with each unit carrying a value of approximately $2.1 million over time.)
— Florida’s victory over Houston in the national championship drew 18.1 million viewers on CBS, the highest total since 2019 (according to Sports Media Watch).
— Overall, the 2025 tournament averaged 10.2 million viewers across CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV, which represents a 3 percent year-over-year increase (per SMW).
The numbers are impressive but not landscape-altering. The foundation of Yormark’s long-haul strategy becomes clear when the real-time data points are combined with broader trends within the sports media space.
He sees basketball’s value rising markedly as streaming platforms acquire more content and grab a larger share of the audience. While college football attracts massive viewership (more than 5 million viewers) glued to single broadcasts, basketball is different. It’s a tonnage sport — and tonnage, especially quality tonnage, will increase in significance as streaming grows.
According to data through the 2023-24 season shared by a sports media research company, college basketball fans are 144 percent more likely than the general population to subscribe to ESPN+, whereas college football fans are merely 41 percent more likely.
(The company, which has clients throughout college and pro sports, asked not to be identified.)
Additionally, college basketball fans have higher affinity levels across all major sports than college football fans and are, for example, 1.8 times more likely than the general population to be fans of Major League Baseball.
Those numbers are significant because cross-sport affinity is coveted by streamers as a means of preventing subscription decay over a full year of content.
Linear media (i.e., over-the-air and cable networks) is about longevity and big events with huge audiences that appeal to advertisers; it also has finite shelf space.
Streaming media is about driving subscriptions and preventing churn within a delivery system that can provide unlimited content.
Yormark’s long-haul goal, it seems, is to offer enough high-quality inventory across as many months as possible. When football ends, high-level college basketball provides a hedge against churn.
It’s about football and basketball, linear and streaming, October and February.
It’s not about basketball accounting for 20 cents of every media dollar now. It’s about every media dollar being worth $1.25 later, with basketball accounting for a greater percentage of the increase than football.
And there’s another equation to consider: Fox’s content strategy into the 2030s.
The company, which shares Big 12 media rights with ESPN, announced in February that it would launch a streaming service later this year that relies heavily on both news and sports.
At the same time, Fox Sports created the College Basketball Crown, a postseason tournament played in Las Vegas over a single week, between the Elite Eight and the Final Four.
“We were looking at our long-term collegiate strategy, and we had some holes,” Fox Sports executive vice president Jordan Bazant said late last year at a college sports forum in Las Vegas sponsored by the Sports Business Journal.
“One area that was a hole was a time when awareness and excitement for college basketball are the greatest: after the conference tournaments.”
It doesn’t take a Murdoch to connect the dots. Fox is launching a streaming service that will lean into sports and a college basketball tournament to fill in “holes” in its college strategy.
By the time 2030 arrives and the Big 12 steps up to the negotiating table, the quality tonnage offered by its basketball inventory could have exponentially more value — for Fox, ESPN or any potential rights-holder with linear and streaming platforms — than is currently visible on the horizon.
If so, Yormark’s double-down on college basketball might prove prescient.
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