Brett Yormark is leaving the Big 12 for a job outside college sports

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark is leaving the conference for a job outside college sports, the league announced Friday. He will stay through January, and the Big 12 will run a national search for its sixth commissioner.

Kansas chancellor Doug Girod, chair of the Big 12 board, told ESPN that Yormark came to the board nearly 10 days ago looking for what Girod called an "elegant exit." The board voted on his departure terms Friday morning. The league had extended his contract through 2030 in May 2025. Yormark has not said where he is going.

"The next commissioner of this league will inherit a conference that is 16 strong," Yormark said in a statement. "There has never been a better time to be a member of the Big 12 than right now."

That is a sales line, and he earned the right to use it. When Yormark took over from Bob Bowlsby in 2022, Oklahoma and Texas had already voted to leave for the SEC and the Big 12 looked like the next league to get picked apart. He pushed the board to go early on a new TV deal with ESPN and Fox, and it worked. The Pac-12 waited and got nothing.

"Had he not joined us and convinced us to go early on redoing our television deal, we all believe we could have ended up like the Pac-12 did," Girod told ESPN.

Then he took the Pac-12's best leftovers. Colorado came back in 2023, and Arizona, Arizona State and Utah followed. Add BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF, which joined before he arrived, and the league has eight new members alongside its legacy eight. Girod also said the board had to slow him down at times, including on a push to add UConn.

He came from Roc Nation with an NBA and NASCAR background, not an athletic director's resume, and the Big 12 hired him for exactly that reason. He talked like a promoter, calling Big 12 basketball the second-best league "behind only the NBA." Houston played for a national title in 2025 and Arizona reached this year's Final Four, so the hype had some backing.

The next commissioner inherits a stable league in a sport that is anything but. College athletics has eligibility lawsuits all over the map right now, and the Big 12 has to replace the person who made it feel bigger than it was.

What to watch: Who the Big 12 targets in its search, and where Yormark lands.