It was announced last week that the college football playoff officially would be staying at 12 teams for next season. There are a couple of tweaks: The four power conference champions are guaranteed a spot regardless of rank and Notre Dame is guaranteed a spot if they finish in the top twelve. Prior to this year I would have said “Ah, how much could that possibly matter?” and of course if those rules had been in place a year earlier you would have swapped a sixth of the 2025 playoff field (Notre Dame and Duke in; Miami and James Madison out) so what do I know.
There was interest from every league but one in expanding the playoff to 16 teams but no changes could be made unless both the SEC and Big Ten agreed, and that’s where our villain emerges. It has been reported by numerous outlets that Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti refused to go to 16 teams unless SEC commissioner Greg Sankey agreed to move to 24 teams two or three years later. (In a weird coincidence, Petitti’s plan and the plan from Fox Sports — which would get a chance to bid on games in an expanded playoff — are identical.) The Big Ten had initially floated the idea of a 24- or 28-team field laden with automatic qualifiers (seven each for the Big Ten and SEC!) back in August, but it gained no traction in a rebuff of Petitti.
“There’s no momentum to expand just for the sake of expanding,” a power conference executive told CBS Sports. “There’s this notion that college sports are really good about being reactionary and taking a short-term gain and not looking at the long-term implications of it.”
Smart! Going from four teams in a postseason field to 24 in less than a decade has to be unprecedented in the history of sports. Right now there is a nice balance between the regular season and the postseason, but doing this — even if you had byes and home field as rewards for higher seeds — is shifting it too much too quickly, especially if you overdo it on automatic qualifiers that would kill the meaning of non-conference games. You want some pain and regret for the teams that are on the wrong side of the bubble instead of putting in every somewhat respectable option.
If you wanted to go the FCS route and have 24 teams but every single conference champion is guaranteed a spot, I’d be more amenable, but I suspect that would never be the case considering the loud carping about the Group of 5 bid already. It’s also important to note that if the playoff expands to 24 and schools get a taste of the money that comes with it, there is almost no path to it getting smaller again, only larger. Holding the line at a maximum of 16 is a noble goal.
Petitti’s conference has won both of the 12-team playoffs but that hasn’t stopped him from wanting to put his mark on a massive change in the sport while chasing more money. As with all the recent leadership hires in college sports, Petitti was brought in to maximize television deals, after a career mostly spent with ABC (where he did work with college sports), CBS (mainly NFL) and MLB Network (baseball). The background wouldn’t matter if we were sure Petitti understood college football but that’s unclear. Last summer he told ESPN that it was important to learn from pro sports, saying, “I know people say this is not professional sports; this is college sports. But there are things you can learn from leagues that are extremely successful, and how they keep teams alive, how they have really meaningful regular seasons. Like, that’s a valuable thing to study, because they do it really well.”
If there’s one obvious thing that’s wrong with college football, it’s that we don’t have really meaningful regular seasons. What Petitti is saying here is there’s some fundamental problem with the product he’s selling — the sport we all love — that would be solved if it were more like a different thing and that we are unwise for feeling the affection we do for it in its current form. If folks want the NFL, the NFL is there for them. We don’t need to gut the spirit of a special thing for an outside shot at maybe increasing quarterly earnings.
Another thing that used to be valuable in college sports were century-old traditions and rivalries. We cannot blame Petitti for adding Southern Cal and UCLA to the Big Ten, as that historically awful move which threw the regional balance of the sport into disarray and insulted anyone who had ever looked at a map belonged to Kevin Warren, months before he left for a job with the Chicago Bears. (Warren also did not have a background in college sports, spending most of his career working for NFL teams and law firms.) But it was Petitti who added Washington and Oregon, dealing the death blow to the Pac-12.
A fun wrinkle in the coverage around that time was the Big Ten telling any reporter who would listen that they didn’t want to be the bad guy and destroy their Rose Bowl partner of nearly a century. As Petitti has settled in the job they’ve dropped the kayfabe and replaced the SEC as the sport’s big bad simply by proposing some of the dumbest ideas you’ve ever heard. Amid a growing consensus that conference championship games were growing irrelevant and in the way of a more condensed postseason schedule Petitti pitched expanding it to include even more games tied to more automatic bids. Even as the idea of a bigger championship weekend concept has faded, Petitti has stayed committed to the idea of more and more automatic bids.
“If you’re 6-3 in the Big Ten, I would argue that’s a great record, and if you stumbled in a nonconference game, I don’t know why that disqualifies you,” Petitti said at last year’s Big Ten media days. “8-4 as a winning percentage, if you project that winning percentage in every other sport, I’m pretty sure you make the postseason.”
Very cool, sir -- whatever you do, don’t look up a random Big Ten schedule and ask who the best wins would be if that program lost to the top three or four teams it faced. It somehow got worse from there. Petitti tried to sell off 10% of the league’s media rights to private equity, an idea so bad he made the Trojans and Wolverines look like heroes for throwing themselves in front of it. A Michigan congresswoman wrote to Petitti opposing the deal and then a month later a Washington congressman called Petitti a jackass and accused him of trying to buy votes for the SCORE Act. While I abhor blind fetishization of bipartisanship it should be noted that the two legislators are on opposite sides of the aisle, a disdain of Petitti’s machinations bringing them together.
The defense of Petitti basically revolves around is it’s his job to make the most money for the Big Ten, not do what’s best for the sport. I am deeply tired of “Well, it’s making money for a select group at the expense of everyone else” as a conversation ender. I’m also not sure how much more money you’d make if the sport contracted nationally due to closing off to a select few teams nor what good it does for the average Big Ten fan that their school is raking it in. Maybe they’ll have their chance to pop up like Indiana, or maybe everyone will remain roughly in their same spot while coaches and administrators get paid more in salary and buyouts. Hey, you might go 6-6 every year and barely play your traditional rivals but at least you’ll know your school has a lucrative media rights deal, the dream of every fan.
One would be wise to wonder if Petitti’s attempt to lock in a big bump in playoff revenue while making more games between mid-tier Big Ten teams meaningful as they compete for the league’s seventh automatic playoff bid is tied to the fact that the number isn’t guaranteed to go up at the level everyone involved would like in the next television deal. The conference is getting crushed by the SEC in television ratings, a trend that will certainly curtail broadcast rights revenues if it continues. Part of that gap is likely that the SEC is on ESPN, the default option for the average sports fan to check when they’re wondering what game is on. But part of the problem is the Big Ten just doesn’t have a lot of quality inventory despite the nine-game conference schedules due to bloat that dilutes the product, underperformance and cowardice in the non-conference.
Let’s take Week One from this most recent season for example. The Big Noon game on FOX was Texas at Ohio State. An excellent start, but the Big Ten doesn’t even have to fill that slot every week because FOX can also take Big 12 games (as they did a few times last season). Next: The CBS game was Nevada at Penn State. Hm. The 3:30 CBS slot used to almost guarantee a marquee matchup, and now there’s a chance you’ll be watching Purdue. The primetime offering on NBC? New Mexico at Michigan, and as many are aware that slot sometimes goes to Notre Dame games. I haven’t seen this confirmed but I assume the Navy game being in primetime (the third home night contest of the season) was a favor from the Irish to the Peacock.
The 2025 Week Two slate on network broadcasts? Iowa at Iowa State, Oklahoma State at Oregon and Boston College at Michigan State. You see where this is going, and that’s before we get into the messiness of the details in those TV deals. 2026 isn’t likely to be a lot rosier in the non-conference. The network partners will get Oklahoma visiting Michigan but the Buckeyes/Longhorns rematch in Austin will be an ESPN/ABC game. Oregon hosting Boise State is pretty solid but it hurts the cause when the defending national champions aren’t playing anyone and neither are big names like Penn State and Nebraska. This would have been the year Big Ten rightsholders got to broadcast Notre Dame/Southern Cal but alas, they’ll have to make do with the Trojans playing Fresno State, Louisiana and an opponent yet to be named.
The Big Ten attempted to add some juice to their schedule by announcing the Rivalry Series (presented by Venmo). Some of these games are not guaranteed to be annual matchups and the kickoff edition was Oregon and Penn State, who had played five times prior to the Ducks’ primetime win in State College and do not play each other in 2026. You can tell this was a well-thought-out plan and not just an attempt to get a few extra bucks for branding because it was announced after over a quarter of the football season had already been played.
One nice thing for Petitti and the Big Ten beyond the respect gained by three straight champions is that by spreading their media rights around to three networks they take a lot of potential criticism off the table. Is a talking head really going to go hard on the league when they’re doing a ton of coverage from their media days and need to make it seem like all the teams are good and big deals worth tuning in to watch? I suspect not. But make no mistake, the Big Ten is at the mercy of the networks/streaming services and their money, and if they decide there’s a better option than Petitti, then that’s that.
(A brief aside on the league that has been traditionally painted as the villain in the sport for much of this century: While the SEC’s deal with ESPN has resulted in annoying coverage and a sketchy Alabama addition to the 2025 bracket, structurally they have not done nor threatened to do nearly as much damage as the Big Ten. The addition of Texas and Oklahoma could be blamed for motivating Warren and Petitti’s westward expansion, but that change on its own isn’t nearly as evil even though it was a net negative on the sport to further consolidate. The Big 12 wasn’t even three decades old when it happened, it makes geographical sense and it at least reunited the two with some traditional rivals: Texas has played Texas A&M 111 times and Arkansas 78; Oklahoma has faced Missouri 90 times.
In regards specifically to Notre Dame, the SEC hasn’t pushed any wild changes to the postseason format and their commitment to at-large bids aligns with what I believe is best for the Irish and the sport. At least for now, their teams are still playing Notre Dame even with the move to nine conference games, which is both fun and good for business. The SEC bias in so much coverage is annoying but that’s as much a college football tradition as anything else after the last two decades.)
Perhaps college football as we know it is already doomed, and we’re merely counting down until a super league is announced with takes like this flailing pointlessly against a fate already written. That’s the cynical and potentially correct opinion. But if it’s not, and there’s a chance to retain much of what we love about the sport, its traditions and its regular season, then Petitti has to be stopped. A guy who might not even be in this position in a few years cannot be allowed to inalterably change the fabric to NFL Lite simply because he wants to leave his mark and chase short-term dollars.
That’s it for today -- this was all locked and loaded before the news broke late Sunday evening that Mike Mickens is departing for the Ravens (unfortunate news, but also inevitable considering the work he’s done) so we’ll cover that and his replacement at a later date. Bridget designed a new shirt based on Marcus Freeman’s message for 2026 that I think is pretty great so check that out. The plan is for a basketball podcast episode later this week (I’m sure it will be cheery) and if you missed last week’s In and Out for 2026 discussion give that a listen (Spotify) (Apple) because I think it was a good one if only for the fact that I didn’t ramble too long about Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove is truly so good).
Stay safe out there and stay warm out there and solidarity with everyone in Minnesota and beyond -- as dark as things are I am heartened and deeply moved by the amount of people standing up for their neighbors and risking harm for no reason other than it is the right thing to do. I am not totally sure when the next edition will be but until then take care of yourself and please please please take care of each other.
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