Big 12 Football: 3 programs that made a mistake leaving the conference

The big breakup that the Big 12 Football conference had leading up to the 2012 season is still impacting various programs today.

Around one decade ago, the Big 12 football conference held one of the strongest groups of blue blood programs in the entire country. They were a true top tier Power Five conference, but that would soon change entering the early 2010’s. The tragedy of the Big 12 was when it started to breakup, and ultimately lose four of its members by the start of the 2012 college football season.

The way that the Big 12 was able to recover and avoid playing any season with just eight teams was by picking up one pretty obvious candidate and one that was far fetched at the time.

With the breakup of the Big East, there were a few different conferences that looked like they would make sense for the Mountaineers. The first that tends to come to mind is the ACC. West Virginia is most geographically relevant to a lot of programs around North Carolina and Virginia, so that would make a lot of sense. The Big Ten even made more sense than the Big 12.

Nonetheless, West Virginia wound up in the Big 12 and at least brings a usually respectable football program to the table and a pretty consistent basketball program. West Virginia definitely has their years on the gridiron.

And the Horned Frogs were a great find for the Big 12. Nestled right in the thick of Big 12 country in Fort Worth, TX, TCU is a model of consistency under the direction of tenured head coach Gary Patterson.

But losing a few of the programs the Big 12 did is hard to forget, especially for the blue bloods of the conference like the Texas Longhorns football program and Oklahoma Sooners. Some of those programs were mistaken to leave too.

Here’s a look back at the three programs that made a mistake in leaving the Big 12 conference within the last decade.