One thing is clear after Big Ten media days: The conference is in la-la-land
LAS VEGAS — You wouldn’t think it possible to feel secluded in Las Vegas, but the Big Ten pulled it off with its media days location this week. To get there from my hotel room, I needed to walk through the entire Mandalay Bay casino, past the pool, down a long hallway and up two escalators to a palatial conference center.
And if that didn’t make one feel like they’d entered another world, they only needed to wait for the Big Ten’s commissioner and coaches to start speaking.
This was the place to come to hear people say, as Washington coach Jedd Fisch did, “We are playing in the best conference in the country, with the toughest schedule in the country.”
Or Indiana’s Curt Cignetti, whose program has rid itself of Power 4 nonconference opponents through 2029, joking, “We figured we would just adopt an SEC scheduling philosophy.”
Amazing how quickly the crowing starts when a league wins back-to-back national championships for the first time since World War II.
However, it was the first speaker of the week, commissioner Tony Petitti, who made me wonder whether I’d somehow landed on an undiscovered planet.
Call it Planet Gaslight.
Behind the scenes, Petitti has spent more than a year pushing a bizarre 16-team College Football Playoff model in which his conference and the SEC would earn four automatic berths each, the ACC and Big 12 two. This was his first time pitching it to a large public audience.
And even though all the proposed details had long since leaked, even though he’d already talked about it on college football analyst Joel Klatt’s podcast, something about being here in person and seeing him extol the merits of such a destructive idea made me question whether we were all being gaslit.
Petitti, whose background is in professional sports, not college, doesn’t just want to expand the postseason. He wants to alter the sport fundamentally. He wants it to look less like college football and more like the NFL.
He wants playoff berths determined by conference standings, like they are in the NFL. Unlike the NFL, though, the conference standings in college football would only encompass two-thirds or three-fourths of a team’s season, which renders the Week 1 Ohio State-Texas showdown comparable to an Indianapolis Colts-Cincinnati Bengals preseason game.
Mostly he wants those four guaranteed berths, so that the Big Ten can stage its play-in weekend before the Playoff — No. 3 versus No. 6 and No. 4 versus No. 5. So if you’re sixth-place Iowa, you can lose to Iowa State, Ohio State and two 5-7 teams and you’re still in the CFP race into December.
Like a 7-9 NFC East team playing for a wild-card berth.
“If you are 6-3 in the Big Ten, I would argue that’s a great record,” Petitti said toward the end of his media-day session. “If you stumbled in a nonconference game, I don’t know why that disqualifies you.”
It was at that moment that all of college football on X broke out with the same reaction: Is this guy even a college football fan?
I asked Petitti at his news conference Tuesday whether public opinion factors into these discussions. He took umbrage with my assertion that “Fans have indicated overwhelmingly they do not want a system where certain conferences get more bids than others.” He responded, “I’m not aware of massive studies with real research that have demonstrated that.”
At that point, I mentioned an admittedly unscientific X poll I’d conducted that morning, in which 75% of the respondents preferred a 5-plus-11 model (five conference champs, 11 at-large bids) in a 16-team field.
His response: “We feel pretty strongly that fans will gravitate to a play-in weekend.”
Possibly. However, that scientific evidence doesn’t exist either.
“Do you think Coke polls the public when it makes changes it thinks are good for its business?” he said in a subsequent interview with columnist John Canzano. Perhaps Petitti is planning to call his system “New Playoff.”
However, whatever you or I think about his plan, the Big Ten’s 18 coaches are entirely behind their commissioner. One by one, they took to the podium, made a point of praising Petitti’s leadership during their opening comments and then delivered their preprogrammed New Playoff pitch.
“I am in 100% agreement with what Tony is saying,” said Wisconsin head coach Luke Fickell.
“It’s imperative we need four automatic bids, a nine-game schedule in the Big Ten Conference,” Fisch said. “We can’t leave it up to chance with a 5-11 combo.”
Oh no. He gaslit the coaches, too.
“If there are seven, eight, nine, 10 (Big Ten) teams alive in November that can have a chance to be in the playoffs, that’s going to do a world of good for our college football team,” Illinois coach Bret Bielema said.
A college football version of the NBA Play-In Tournament would be beneficial for Illinois’ football team. But it would be infinitely worse for the sport as a whole if Illinois received special CFP access that its counterparts in the ACC, Big 12 and six other conferences do not.
And if that sounds like common sense, well, not here on Planet Gaslight.
My sense is that the coaches cared less about the actual format than its potential to whip those cowards in the SEC into line. One after another lamented that the SEC refuses to join them in the land of nine-game league schedules, knowing a four-AQ model may finally push them over the edge.
“When you play nine conference games, it’s not the same as someone who plays eight conference games,” Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. “So, if you’re going to be compared against that, then it’s just not the same.”
We can all agree that the mighty SEC has not been the mighty SEC the past couple of years. First Michigan (against Alabama) and then Ohio State (against Tennessee and Texas) proved that in the playoff. But there’s not a single set of credible data that suggests the Big Ten is playing more demanding schedules than the SEC. (Wisconsin, which plays at Alabama, Ohio State, at Oregon and at Michigan this season, is the notable exception.)
I’m not sure how the Big Ten can argue with a straight face that the SEC is “ducking” people. Not when those past two national title teams, the 2023 Michigan and 2024 Ohio State teams, did not play a single Power 5 nonconference foe between them. Not when 2025 preseason title favorite Penn State is playing Nevada, FIU and Villanova.
How did we get here? Why is a conference that has definitively proved its CFP worthiness so hung up on rigging future playoffs to its benefit?
Well, let’s connect the dots.
Petitti, the successor to Kevin Warren, began his job in May 2023. Less than three months in, the Pac-12 imploded after USC and UCLA joined the Big Ten; the conference then threw Oregon and Washington a lifeline. Suddenly, the Big Ten had 18 mouths to feed — many with realistic national championship aspirations. Suddenly, a 12-team CFP, which had not even launched yet, already felt too small for them.
Meanwhile, it’s no secret what entity holds the most influence over Petitti’s conference: Fox. In an unusual arrangement, the Big Ten Network, not the conference itself, controls the media rights. Fox owns 61% of BTN, effectively giving it control over the Big Ten. And Fox badly wants a bigger piece of college football’s postseason than its lone current property, the Holiday Bowl.
ESPN has the CFP tied up for another seven years, so those proposed Big Ten play-in games would both provide Fox and/or its sublicensees, CBS and NBC, with more inventory while putting more cash in the coffers of Big Ten members.
This helps explain why Petitti talks about a reimagined, watered-down Championship Saturday as if he’s delivering water to the Mojave Desert.
“The weekend that we’re talking about, where you would have championship games across all conferences, meaningful play-in games — I don’t see how that’s a bad thing for football, and I think fans will gravitate to it,” he said.
The problem is, his friends in the SEC haven’t gravitated to it. The two parties share equal control of the post-2025 CFP format. That’s why these interminable discussions, which began in February 2024, remain at an impasse.
“We are open to considering any format ideas that come from our (conference) colleagues or the CFP staff,” Petitti said, “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.”
A business that fundamentally changes a cherished product, despite no apparent demand for it, will struggle to gain the support of its customers.
Ask Coke.
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