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The Big 12 media days are underway, officially kicking off the 2025 college football preseason as the first power conference to get things started. Commissioner Brett Yormark has already made headlines for discussing changes that need to be made to the College Football Playoff. To help kick off media days, they announced a partnership with Microsoft and their AI, Copilot, to mixed results.
To help promote the partnership, the Big 12 posted AI renderings of the different stadiums across the conference, each with a different vibe; for example, Arizona's stadium was filled with cacti, while Colorado and BYU were filled with buffaloes and cougars, respectively. The results were mixed, with many fans and members of the media slamming the results.
West Virginia athletics SB Nation website The Smoking Musket posted on Blue Sky: “The Big 12 is posting AI stadium pictures on their official Twitter account, and (among other things) all of the end zone text is oriented upside down if it were in an actual stadium.”
Well-known sports journalist and media personality, Timothy Burke, also took to Blue Sky to voice his displeasure at what the Big 12 did.
“Look at this s–t! Microsoft made this and said, ‘Please publicize this; it shows how powerful our software is,' and the Big XII said, ‘Yes, these are perfect.' We will happily promote our partnership with you and how it reflects on our member institutions.”
Those two were some of the most vocal and prominent voices, but if you look at threads on both Blue Sky and X, they are filled with different fans and accounts ripping to shreds how the renderings look. A simple look shows fans saying they are “awful” and “horrible.”
As a power conference, the Big 12 has been at the forefront of thinking outside the box, thanks to commissioner Brett Yormark. Since the Big Ten and the SEC have the majority of the power in college athletics, they have had to get creative across the board, including marketing. This partnership seems like a big misstep.
The Big 12 was one of the first conferences to discuss the possibility of private equity investing in major college football. They have gone through several options to compete with the best.
This partnership was a massive misstep based on the reaction across the college football landscape. It is a rare mistake that the Big 12 has made under Brett Yormark's leadership.
