Texas Football: 3 Big 12 teams that would hurt most void of Horns and OU

TCU

The way that TCU rose to power in the Mountain West Conference with the emerging football program at the time is what drew the Big 12 to add them to the mix in the first place. TCU has largely rose to national prominence that is often in place to compete among the better teams in the Big 12 under the direction of longtime head coach Gary Patterson.

But it would clearly hurt Patterson and the Horned Frogs a ton if the Longhorns and Sooners were to leave the Big 12 and thus leave them hanging. Patterson and the Horned Frogs spent the better part of the last decade as one of the biggest thorns in the side of the Longhorns. The same could be said likely if any other power conference were to bring TCU into the mix.

Given that TCU is still a developing brand, but one that is not as big as even some of the others in the Big 12 such as the Texas Tech Red Raiders and Oklahoma State, that could be hard to appeal to other conferences in realignment. TCU was a Group of Five program before the Big 12 took it on in the last version of conference realignment in the early 2010s.

TCU was made famous by its rise to football prominence, largely under the direction of Patterson as head coach. And if there was a post-Big 12 landscape that existed without Oklahoma and Texas, TCU could be one of the ruling parties. But that still doesn’t make the Big 12 all that much more marketable than if someone like Baylor, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, etc. was the best team in the mix at that point.