Carrying a university into the Big 12

For me, Cincinnati joining the Big 12 was a ten-year project that most people experienced as a press conference.

Back in my Office of the President days - 2012 to 2017 - part of my job was championing the university's case for a power-conference invitation: building the data story, identifying the leverage points, supporting the relationships that keep a university in the conversation. We called the ambition what it was, internally: this university belongs at the top table. For years the answer was "not yet."

Then it was yes. And I learned that the yes is where the work starts.

What a conference change actually touches#

The public story of realignment is television money. The internal story is that everything with a logo on it is suddenly wrong. A partial list of what "we're in the Big 12 now" meant operationally:

• A full brand transition - we moved from Under Armour to Nike and Jordan Brand in the same window as the conference switch, which meant new uniforms for every sport, aligned to a refreshed brand position, on an immovable deadline. Nobody delays a football season because your apparel timeline slipped.
• The signage archaeology. Every American Athletic Conference logo and Under Armour mark in our buildings - walls, courts, scoreboards, tunnel entrances - had to be found, replaced, and quality-checked. You do not realize how many logos a stadium contains until each one is a line item.
• The data and systems layer. New conference, new opponents, new scheduling structures, new reporting relationships - every system that thought it knew what a "conference game" was needed to learn otherwise.
• The fans. A conference change re-prices season tickets emotionally. We spearheaded a five-city "DayOne Ready Tour" with our alumni and advancement partners before the debut season - taking the case for the new era to the people who'd fund it, city by city.

What I'd tell the next school in the portal#

Treat it as a program, not a party. The announcement is one day. The transition is eighteen months of coordinated work across facilities, apparel, digital, ticketing, and brand - with a season opener as the deadline none of it can miss.

The brand moment is a leverage moment. Because everything had to change anyway, we could make changes that would've been impossible to justify individually. A conference transition is the cheapest moment you'll ever get for a full brand reset - spend it deliberately.

Data readiness is invisible until it isn't. Nobody tweets about your scheduling systems handling the new conference correctly. They absolutely tweet when the app shows the wrong opponent.

Start the fan story early. The tour mattered because it happened before day one. By kickoff, the argument for the era had already been made in person, five cities deep.

A decade after we started making the case, I watched us take the field as a Big 12 program wearing the new marks, in a stadium with the right signage, selling tickets through systems that knew what conference they were in. Nobody in the stands thought about any of that - which is exactly what done looks like.