Finishing among the top six in the regular season will be rewarded with a first-round bye in the redesigned men's and women's Big 12 basketball tournaments. It's one of the last adjustments the league had to make after Colorado and Nebraska dropped out this year and reduced the league to 10. As a 12-team league, only the top four teams got byes. Under the new format, seeds No. 8 and 9 and 7 and 10 will play on the first day. Then the quarterfinals will match No. 4 vs. No. 5, No. 3 vs. No. 6, No. 1 vs. the 8-9 winner and No. 2 vs. the 7-10 winner. The league spent several months studying various possibilities before adopting the new plan at its annual meetings on Thursday. Read more: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=6620612
ESPN.com Writer Likes "New" Big 12 Eamonn Brennan, one of ESPN.com's college basketball writers, weighs in on the benefits of a 10-team Big 12 Conference: The new-look Big 12 will only boost the rivalries between top teams like Kansas and Texas. In the process, it will ensure that any regular-season Big 12 champion is one that survived the same balanced schedule as the rest of the league. Throw in the fact that most Big 12 teams seem intent on keeping their nonconference challenges alive, at least for the forseeable future, and the costs to the teams involved -- creating a minefield of potential momentum-crushing losses in both league and non-league play -- should be outweighed by the RPI benefits the league will receive by the end of the season. When other leagues made their football-minded expansion moves last summer, they got bigger. Many of them -- the Big Ten (Nebraska), the Pac-12 (Utah, Colorado), the Big East (TCU) -- also got worse. The Big 12 went in the opposite direction, both in volume and quality. The result should be interesting from January on. Plus, we get to see Texas BB play Kansas BB twice. No matter where your allegiances are, this is an extremely promising development. http://www.big12sports.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=10410&SPID=13131&SPSID=106091 The Phillips 66 Big 12 Men's Basketball Championship will be held at Kansas City's Sprint Center in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Kansas City hosted the tournament in 2010 and 2011 - again marking another five-year run for an event in one city. The Phillips 66 Big 12 Women's Basketball Championship will be held in Kansas City's Municipal Auditorium in 2012 and 2013. Big 12 women's administrators decided to hold off awarding the 2014 tournament.
