At this point, if you’re a college sports fan, conference realignment has become as natural as attending a game itself.
While realignment was relatively rare for a long time, the past 20 years have seen round after round of realignment.
Few teams are more familiar with realignment than the UConn Huskies.
Since 2011, UConn has gone from the Big East to the American Athletic Conference, back to the Big East, and is now reportedly in talks regarding a move to the Big 12.
ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported the news Friday night.
Thamel notes that while discussions have occurred, the league isn’t close to voting on the matter. Multiple Big 12 schools have “pushback’ regarding UConn that needs to be addressed.
“I think the word is ‘premature’. There’s a far distance between conversations and anything that would happen. The presidents haven’t seen the case yet,” a high-ranking Big 12 official told Thamel.
Since the Big East doesn’t support football, the Huskies have been independent since rejoining the conference in 2020. The football program has had varying levels of success over the years and has often been at the bottom of the conference when it was in a conference. Still, the Huskies make up for it by having the most dominant women’s basketball program and one of the most dominant men’s basketball programs of the past 25 years.
Since 1999, the UConn men’s team has won the NCAA Tournament six times, including back-to-back in 2023 and 2024. Geno Auriemma and the women’s team have won the NCAA Tournament a record ten times since then, including every year from 2013 to 16.
A conference call with Big 12 presidents is reportedly scheduled for sometime this week so the conference and its leadership can review what’s next in this saga.
[ESPN]
