KU-UH hoops, bowl plans crucial B12 Mexico launch
The Huge 12 Conference is extending its reach into Mexico, revealing strategies Thursday for males’s and ladies’s basketball games to be played in Mexico City late next year while also checking out a possible football bowl game in Monterrey.
“Mexico is a natural extension to the Huge 12 footprint,” commissioner Brett Yormark stated Thursday. “Through Huge 12 Mexico, our student-athletes will have the chance to contend in a global setting, and our conference will have the possibility to showcase our brand throughout Mexico.”
Kansas and Houston, as reported by ESPN on Wednesday, will play each other in guys’s and women’s basketball at Mexico City’s Arena CDMX in December 2024. After that, women’s soccer teams and baseball groups from the Big 12 will take part in exhibitions versus clubs from the region.Editor’s Picks
Prepare for a football championship game– to possibly be played following the 2026 routine season– has actually been targeted for Monterrey.The Big 12 will expand from 10 to 14 schools on July 1 when BYU, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston officially join the league. Those additions come a year prior to the departures of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC.Yormark discussed the Mexico strategy at Huge 12 conferences
in West Virginia recently, saying growth stays a focus for the conference that is distributing a record$440 million of revenue amongst its 10 present schools for the 2022-23 academic year.Yormark expressed to the league’s leadership that the Mexico initiative will assist provide the league a natural extension into a local footprint in Mexico and give Big 12 professional athletes the experience in contending in another nation, sources informed ESPN.In his first year as commissioner, Yormark brokered a six-year television extension with ESPN and Fox that has offered the league stability, and negotiated the early exit of Oklahoma and Texas.Five current or future Huge 12 campuses– Baylor, Houston, TCU, Texas and Texas Tech– are located within 400 miles of Mexico
. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State have school extensions in Mexico.Along with hosting conference games throughout several sports, Big 12 Mexico will see the league perform a variety of neighborhood outreach programs, commercial collaborations,
product and activations. The league on Thursday stated that will include partnering with significant musicians and artists and releasing an influencer marketing project in the region.The championship game in Monterrey would be the 2nd postseason one currently held outside the United States, joining the Bahamas Bowl in Nassau. Historically, there have actually been others, consisting of the now-defunct International Bowl in Toronto that held its last game in 2010. The Bacardi Bowl was also played in Havana, Cuba, periodically over the previous century.The league is still exploring organization partners and a league pairing for the bowl game.ESPN’s Pete Thamel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.