LAS VEGAS — Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti came out of seclusion at his conference media days Tuesday. It was nice to hear from the most reclusive power player in college sports. Unfortunately, he didn’t bring many good ideas with him.
Petitti was asked to defend (or at least explain) a College Football Playoff proposal that has little public support, and perhaps even less among his fellow commissioners. His case wasn’t terribly compelling.
Petitti is championing a 16-team, 4-4-2-2-1 format—another number salad from the prolix world of college sports. He wants four automatic bids for his league and the SEC, two apiece for the Big 12 and the ACC, one for a Group of 6 conference champion and three at-large bids that could go to anyone. He is in favor of play-in games for those automatic bids within the Power 4 conferences, and he is in favor of limiting the influence of a human selection committee on deciding who makes the playoff.
Where to even begin with this folderol?
First, the big picture: Expanding the playoff after just one (successful) season at 12 teams is premature. It’s an unnecessary disruption in a sport that struggles to settle down and let a postseason format play out over time. The impasse between Petitti’s preferred format and a recent SEC push for five automatic bids and 11 at-larges might actually work in the sport’s favor, forcing a playoff status quo for 2026 at least.
As for the particulars of Petitti’s proposed expansion, let’s go through some of his points.
He wants a dramatic departure from the way college athletics conducts almost all of its championships. Nowhere else in NCAA Division I are conferences awarded multiple assured bids before a season is even played. And only in hockey does a committee not select teams (a mathematical formula is used, but a committee seeds the teams).
“We are open to considering any format ideas that come from our 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.”
There has been a growing movement in college football to vilify the humans who make these selections, despite a long history of largely doing a good job. Excluding Florida State from the 2023 field was highly controversial, but that was in the four-team days. It would be a non-factor in a 12-team playoff. Tough decisions over who is No. 12 vs. No. 13 and No. 14 are highly unlikely to affect who wins a national title.
Planting seeds of doubt about the committee is another corrosion of public trust and creates another straw-man argument for championing automatic bids. This is a bid for control.
“Every time you think about expansion, I think there’s some sort of counter-idea that it gets easier [for the committee] to make these decisions,” Petitti said. “It actually gets harder. More teams look alike. More teams are going to have 9–3 records and struggle in a conference road game.”
Yes. And leaving out some of those 9–3 teams (like Alabama last year) will not be the greatest injustice known to man. It will not exclude a national champion. It will simply be a judgment call, the likes of which selection committees have made for decades in college sports. If Crimson Tide fans (and some media members) want to have a fit on their behalf, let them.
(Also: The people who “think about expansion” are the commissioners, not the general public.)
Another point: Petitti’s plan for play-in games that involve the top six teams in the Big Ten is likely to do the opposite of what he says he wants: maintain a vital regular season that features big-time nonconference games.
“I kind of focus more on what’s the incentive to get schools to schedule stronger games?” Petitti said. “I think fans want more of those games. I think there’s been some writing, well, those games won’t mean anything if you are qualifying off your conference. I disagree with that. At the end of the day, you are still playing for seeding. If you had a system where you are qualifying off your conference record, winning or losing a tough nonconference game could affect seeding.”
Seeding is not going to be top of mind for anyone but programs like Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan and Oregon. It seems more likely that most of the teams in the Big Ten would try to follow the Indiana model: schedule three nonconference cadavers, build confidence, stay healthy and try to put everything into a top-six conference finish.
Would more teams and fan bases have something to be excited about? Yes. More mediocre teams. Iowa would have been the No. 6 seed last year with an 8–4 record that included losses to 5–7 UCLA and 5–7 Michigan State, plus wins over FCS Illinois State and Troy. The world was not clamoring to see that Iowa team given a chance to wiggle its way into the playoff.
Toward that end, Petitti argued that a team with a .667 winning percentage (8–4 overall, 6–3 in the league) could be of playoff caliber. “If you project that winning percentage across every other sport, I’m pretty sure you make the postseason,” he said.
Just one thing: A team with a .667 winning percentage in the NFL didn’t schedule two or more nonconference home games against demonstrably inferior opponents. They don’t do guaranteed wins in that league. So most of those 8–4 teams could more accurately be viewed as 6–4 teams.
Arguably the most tone-deaf of all arguments Petitti and SEC counterpart Greg Sankey have made for an expanded playoff is the altered conference alignment that has created 16-to-18-team behemoths. League records are now only partial snapshots of a conference’s full profile, with wildly disparate schedules.
“At the end of the day, there are 18 members in the Big Ten,” Petitti said. “You have 17 available opponents. You play nine of them. There’s a lot of discrepancy, let alone making comparisons across the leagues. There’s a lot of issues about how you compare teams inside the Big Ten. Your schedule and the way it plays out might be easier than people thought when it was made up.”
That, power-conference commissioners, is a you problem. Not an us problem. The SEC raided the Big 12. The Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC raided the Pac-12. Nobody made them bloat their conferences to an unwieldy size that makes it difficult to know the true pecking order. Greed has repercussions and complications that shouldn’t be foisted off on the public in the form of a rigged playoff that further benefits the Big Ten and SEC.
Keep in mind that Petitti and Sankey already adjusted playoff revenue distributions to favor their leagues. They also were handed control of the future format. The power play has not been well-received outside their two conferences.
While Sankey and the SEC seem to have acquired an understanding that they’re treading into dangerous territory with the public trust, Petitti isn’t owning it. At least not here, not now. A rare public appearance from the Big Ten commissioner didn’t do much to convince anyone he’s got the best interests of college football in mind.
