Big 12 launches ‘international extension’ into Mexico, exploring potential bowl game for 2026

The Big 12 introduced a world extension in Mexico on Thursday, with upcoming video games deliberate for males’s and ladies’s basketball, ladies’s football and baseball. The initiative, titled “Big 12 Mexico,” is about to release in December 2024 with Kansas and Houston squaring off at Arena CDMX in Mexico City for each males’s and ladies’s basketball video games. Exhibition video games that includes to-be-announced Big 12 baseball and ladies’s football groups towards native golf equipment are to apply.

Also at the Big 12’s radar is potential bowl game in Monterrey, Mexico, beginning after the 2026 faculty soccer common season. Estadio BBVA, a 53,500-seat stadium in Monterrey, has been the objective venue for any Mexico-based Big 12 soccer video games because the convention seeks to make its mark south of the border, consistent with CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd. 

The bowl game, will have to it materialize, will be the first held in Mexico. The Bahamas Bowl is the lone world game within the present Bowl Season lineup. 

“Mexico is a natural extension to the Big 12 footprint, and I’m thrilled to introduce Big 12 Mexico as the Conference’s first-ever international presence,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said in a statement. “Through Big 12 Mexico, our student-athletes will have the opportunity to compete in an international setting, and our Conference will have the chance to showcase our brand across Mexico.”

The Big 12 plans to spouse with Zignia, a Mexico City-based are living leisure company, to marketplace the convention previous to the athletic occasions happening. Among different efforts to develop a world target market, the convention may be in search of to protected Spanish radio announces for each the Big 12 soccer and basketball identify video games beginning for the 2023-24 season. 

Big 12 Mexico comes as part of a bigger effort beneath Yormark, who assumed the function of commissioner remaining summer time, to enlarge the convention’s achieve because it prepares for the departures of flagships Oklahoma and Texas in Summer 2024. Yormark, who secured a six-year, $2.3 billion extension of the league’s media rights maintain ESPN and Fox Sports thru 2031, has additionally overseen projects that come with plans for a Big 12-wide Pro Day in 2024 and a partnership with New York City’s Rucker Park that includes clinics led by way of coaches from each males’s and ladies’s Big 12 basketball methods. 

A national footprint in growth additionally stays on Yormark’s radar. The Big 12 is already welcoming 4 new individuals — BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF — in time for the approaching college yr. 

“As I’ve said all along, we have an appetite to be a national conference in our makeup from coast to coast,” Yormark informed journalists remaining week following the Big 12’s spring industry conferences. “We love our current composition, love the four new schools who are coming in next month. However, if the opportunity presented itself to create value, we would pursue it.”