It’s the Big Ten’s turn to take centerstage with their media days in the historic Big Ten stronghold of *checks notes* Las Vegas. And commish Tony Petitti isn’t backing down from his hopes to continue transforming college football.
The Big Ten and SEC have developed a stranglehold over the future of college football, and maybe thereby college athletics as a whole. And Petitti is attempting to use his power and influence to the max, with specific regards to a very controversial format change to the College Football Playoff. Petitti and the conference have advocated for automatic qualifiers from the Big Ten and SEC, greatly reducing the role of a selection committee, narrowing opportunities to the rest of the field, and perhaps blowing up any meaningful regular season games.
But at the media days in Las Vegas, Petitti doubled down on the idea, even answering possible backlash that may come from fans.
“With respect to format, the Big Ten has been consistent in strong preference for a playoff system that allocates spots based on conference standings and the results of play-in games,” Petitti said.
“We want to better connect the regular season and the postseason. A critical goal of any postseason format, regardless of sport, is to keep as many teams alive as deep into the season as possible. We want more conference games to matter in November. Also, the playoff format should not function as a disincentive to schedule tough non-conference games. As we said throughout this process, we are open to considering any format ideas that come from our colleagues or the CFP staff. But to be clear, formats that increase the discretion and role of the CFP selection committee will have a difficult time getting support from the Big Ten,” the commissioner added.
There is a lot to unpack here.
First of all, Petitti is committed to doing what’s best for the Big Ten and the Big Ten only. Shifting more automatic qualifiers his way and the way of the SEC will hurt everyone else in college football at the expense of Iowa-Illinois and Mississippi State-Texas A&M games for fourth place in the league. There will be little drama over who actually wins the conferences, and little drama elsewhere as teams jockey for what would have been at-large bids with the best schedules and resumes possible.
Second, Petitti is advocating for replacing conference championship games that have turned largely meaningless with play-in games for the last automatic qualifying spots. Again, we’re talking about spotlighting more average teams rather than the conference elites. The best thing to do would just be to pass on the conference championship weekend altogether or expand the playoff, but that doesn’t exclusively help the Big Ten’s revenue.
Finally, Petitti’s thought that automatic qualifiers will help regular season non-conference games will likely have the opposite effect. Take a look at Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti flaunting the Hoosiers’ embarrassingly easy non-conference schedule by saying he’s just following the lead of the SEC. Why would Ohio State play Texas? Why would Michigan schedule Oklahoma or Notre Dame? There would be literally no point to risking top players to injury in a tough game when you could play a MAC school and have another glorified preseason game to prepare for the conference season.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey publicly said the SEC could stick with the 12-team model if conversations with the Big Ten don’t go anywhere. As with everything in the sport, the future of the CFP is in their hands. But if Tony Petitti is this committed to automatic qualifiers, what we have now with the College Football Playoff is far better than what it could potentially be.