ROSEMONT, Ill. — One week before college athletics’ superpower conferences meet in Nashville, Tenn., Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti identified the mission for working with the Southeastern Conference and why it’s important at this moment in time.
The NCAA, Big Ten, SEC and other conferences are waiting for U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken to rule on a proposed settlement of the $2.7 billion House case. Whether Wilken accepts or rejects the proposal, the entire college athletics structure will change. For the 18 Big Ten schools and the 16 in the SEC, there are enough similarities that make cooperation essential.
“We still need to be doing the work about what that next set of rules looks like and how we all come together to do all those things,” Petitti told The Athletic in an interview at Big Ten men’s basketball media day Thursday. “So the timing on that is really important.
“I look at it as like a holistic approach. It’s everything we should be talking about — scheduling, regular season, postseason, all of it.”
Petitti, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, every athletic director in both leagues plus other league officials will gather in Nashville, Tenn., next Thursday to discuss issues ranging from governance to on-field competition. There’s a desire to expand postseason partnerships in bowl games and compete more often in regular-season football games.
Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox.
Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox.
Sign Up
Petitti described the relationship as in the “planning stages” and hopes the groups can have an open discussion in areas of shared interest. He and Sankey were in constant communication during the House settlement talks, which their leagues voted to accept in May. And, of course, all conversations will involve football.
“If you look at this past year, the top two or three games in terms of size of the audience, two of them are Big Ten-SEC crossover games,” Petitti said. “We know the fans will come to watch these games. We know how well they do on-site and everything else. So these ideas of trying to do more and also hearing from all of our guys collectively about the challenges they face on campus is a good thing.”
Last season, the 12 highest-rated college football games involved at least one team currently competing in the SEC or the Big Ten, and three of them were head-to-head matchups. The top 20 highest-rated games in 2023-24 involved 18 Big Ten teams and 15 from the SEC.
This fall, Texas–Michigan (9.19 million viewers) and USC-LSU (8.62 million) ranked second and third, respectively, among rated college football games. Last week’s Georgia-Alabama matchup garnered the most viewers with 11.99 million, according to Sports Media Watch.
Along with the heavyweight matchups and College Football Playoff games, last season’s bowls like Missouri–Ohio State (9.72 million), Ole Miss–Penn State (7.77 million) and Tennessee–Iowa (6.8 million) generated massive numbers. From the conferences to their network partners, there’s a desire to see more of those matchups in the regular season. That will be a part of their dialogue next week.
“We’re at the very early stages of figuring out ways to maybe come together to play more,” Petitti said. “That could take time. It could be very different in the beginning. It could ramp up over time. There’s a lot of ideas.
“I’m really excited to be in the room to hear the ideas come out. I think that’s what we’re trying to foster in this meeting.”
With regard to how a partnership might impact annual nonconference rivalries in both conferences like Georgia–Georgia Tech, Clemson-South Carolina or Iowa-Iowa State, Petitti said, “Whatever you come up with, there’s still going to be a lot of local decisions about who you play. We’re just talking.”
There’s also potential cooperation in upcoming College Football Playoff discussions. The 12-team field with five conference champions and seven at-large qualifiers expires after the 2025-26 season. There are plenty of options available for a reimagined CFP from expansion to 14 or even 16 teams and conferences securing automatic qualifiers beyond its champion.
Petitti deferred when asked what changes he will advocate for, saying, “we’ll see what the conversations are like in the next couple weeks.” He said he’d like to observe this year’s system, which includes four on-campus Playoff games, before making a specific push on number of automatic qualifiers or additional CFP contestants. Petitti previously has vouched for at least three automatic qualifiers for the Big Ten after the current CFP system ends in 2026.
“We’ll go into this year’s format to see how it plays out, to go through a selection process before we talk specifically about what the right number of teams is, what the right format is, how you qualify,” Petitti said. “We’ve said some things in the past. I think people can see that.
“We negotiated (possible changes) as part of the CFP deal (that) we had the right to be in a room with the SEC to make some of those determinations. But we need to do it collectively.”
With both leagues expanding this year — the Big Ten added USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon; the SEC now includes Texas and Oklahoma — CFP qualifying criteria becomes a critical element. The SEC has five teams ranked in the top 10, while the Big Ten has four. The Big 12 and ACC combine for seven teams ranked in the top 25, while the SEC and Big Ten have 16.
As the teams beat one another in conference play, their records could falter below other leagues without as much high-level competition. That could impact their CFP status.
“From our point of view, strength of schedule is one of the key components of how you evaluate teams in a situation where there’s a lot of tough decisions made,” Petitti said. “The reason why we talk about it was that it’s a very difficult task to compare two teams that didn’t play head-to-head or may not even have a single common opponent. That’s a tough, tall order.
“When you’re looking at the resumes of two teams, and I think we play the schedule we play and that has value in the regular season. We feel really good about that. We hope that when committee is looking at the resume of anyone in the Big Ten that the strength-of-schedule, obviously, is an important part.”
Photo: Melissa Tamez / Imagn Images