Saturday marks the official shift date for nearly 20 programs that are bouncing from one conference to another. In a couple of instances, teams are leaving Division I altogether.
Conference realignment news has been an annual rite of speculation and rumormongering — often with results that validate said speculation. Now that we’ve hit the midway point of 2023, let’s remind and recap on how college sports’ tectonic plates have shifted.
Here are the five biggest takeaways on college basketball’s conference changes across Division I. Below that, we’ve got the list of all the schools swaps for 2023 and the ones to come in the future.
1. Big 12 going to 14 teams for just one season
A year from now, Texas and Oklahoma’s long-anticipated move from the Big 12 to the SEC will be official. But for the the 2023-24 season, they’ll take one last ride around the league they built up before bolting for the 16-team Southeastern Conference. The Big 12 has been a 10-team league for the past dozen years; it’s jumping by four this season, due to the influx of Houston, Cincinnati, UCF and BYU. In football, that’s going to make for a crowded and interesting collection of teams vying to qualify for the College Football Playoff in its final iteration of being a four-team event. In basketball, the question will be: Can the Big 12 remain the best hoops league in the sport after bloating to 14? Houston has been one of the best programs in college hoops the past half-decade, but usually, the larger the conference, the weaker it is top to bottom.
The Big 12 remains in a speculative market moving forward. Commissioner Brett Yormark has been flirting with Pac-12 programs, in addition to Gonzaga and UConn. In a year, the Big 12 will actually be — here’s a novel concept — at 12 teams. How long will it stay that way?
2. AAC downgraded — but adds a Final Four school
The American Athletic Conference has been…
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