Texas Football: The dire amount that the Big 12 is about to lose financially

A recent study that was released this week found out the estimates of how much the Big 12 is about to lose with the likes of Texas football (namely among other sports) and the Oklahoma Sooners headed for the SEC. This study was conducted by the Perryman Group on the “Potential Economic Consequences of Texas and OU Leaving the Big 12 Conference”.

It is clear that the consequences of Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 are going to be pretty dire. We already knew that the two football programs that financially propped up the Big 12 were the Longhorns and Sooners. You could make the argument that programs like the Kansas Jayhawks, West Virginia Mountaineers, Baylor Bears, etc. really help financially in basketball, but that’s not as big of a revenue driver as football.

Regardless of whether the Big 12 still lasts after Texas and Oklahoma are officially competing in the Big 12, the economic loss to the conference will be enormous. There will be a loss of roughly a minimum of $1 billion in annual GDP to the Big 12 no matter what in this economic study.

How Texas football and OU leaving for the SEC will impact multiple points of the economics of the Big 12’s bottom line?

Here’s more on what this study had to say on the matter of the numbers of the economic loss to the Big 12 as a whole.

"For the communities across the Big 12 Conference, the realignment could be expected to cause losses of $938.9 million in annual gross product and 12,623 jobs under Scenario 1, with $1.3 billion in annual gross product and 18,063 jobs for Scenario 2."

Either way you look at it, this will be a massive loss of GDP and jobs for the Big 12. It would be interesting to see what the type of job pickup would be if some of the bigger remaining Big 12 schools were to join other power conferences to limit the economic loss to the programs themselves. But this is a very notable set of economic statistics no matter what.

And here are some of the losses that the college towns of Lubbock (Texas Tech University), Fort Worth (Texas Christian University), and Waco (Baylor University), put together in this study.

"Total annual losses for these three communities were found to include $397.7 million in annual gross product and 5,322 jobs under Scenario 1 and $569.1 million in annual gross product and 7,615 jobs under Scenario 2 (including multiplier effects)."

It is likely that these could be movable figures depending on where the remaining Big 12 schools such as Texas Tech, Baylor, and TCU, land next. If the three programs stick around in the Big 12, then these figures could hold pat. But if, for instance, all three of those schools went to the PAC-12 then the economic loss could shrink potentially.

Texas and Oklahoma could help to boost the bottom line of the remaining eight Big 12 schools if the conference sticks together with the roughly $150 million that could be owed. But that likely wouldn’t do much to prop up the losses in GDP when it’s all said and done.

Meanwhile, the financial boost that Texas and Oklahoma could be getting from heading to the SEC could be sizable. This type of financial loss for the Big 12 does go a long way to show just how reliant this group was on the Longhorns and Sooners.