Around one decade ago, the Big 12 football conference held one of the strongest groups of blue blood programs in the entire country. They were a true top tier Power Five conference, but that would soon change entering the early 2010’s. The tragedy of the Big 12 was when it started to breakup, and ultimately lose four of its members by the start of the 2012 college football season.
The way that the Big 12 was able to recover and avoid playing any season with just eight teams was by picking up one pretty obvious candidate and one that was far fetched at the time.