In a show of force and unity, the two most powerful leaders in college athletics sat side-by-side and made clear to the rest of the ecosystem that any major change will run through the Big Ten and SEC moving forward.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey answered a litany of questions during a 45-minute media session following the historic meeting between the two conferences. The two native New Yorkers have built a strong rapport since Petitti stepped in as the Big Ten’s commissioner in 2023 and that was on full display Thursday in how they described the meeting’s purpose.
But two shrewd leaders like Petitti and Sankey aren’t going to reveal everything about their grand plan to a bunch of reporters. You have to read between-the-lines, combined with talking to other informed sources, to ascertain what it all means.
With that in mind, we’re breaking down some key quotes and what they really mean following Thursday’s Big Ten and SEC powwow in Nashville.
What they said: “I have yet to see a single thing in any plan that I’ve learned details about that contains things that we couldn’t do ourselves and do with other colleagues,” Petitti said. “I don’t see anything that’s proprietary that anybody holds, that we would need, that someone else controls to do what they’re talking about.
“It’s basically schedule more good games, and reorganize the way you play those games, like in terms of just tiering or going across and redoing divisions. Some say conferences can survive. Some say you don’t need conferences. At the end of the day, I think there’s a strong commitment that we have the ability to do all of this ourselves.”
What it means: Back off, private equity. Petitti and Sankey were very forceful in their comments that there is zero need to cede power to outside entities that have garnered attention in recent weeks like “Project Rudy.” While there is interest in those ideas at the university level within those conferences — Tennessee AD Danny White is even an “ambassador” for the College Student Football League — Sankey and Petitti have zero desire to willingly fold their royal flush hands for someone else to financially capitalize. Even if they loved the Super League concepts, which they most certainly do not, what incentive do the Big Ten and SEC have to embrace them at the conference level? No one willingly gives up power that was hard earned.
Groups like Project Rudy have some power players behind them and seemingly real money to throw around, but to Petitti’s point, what are they doing that the conferences and their TV partners couldn’t do themselves? It was reminiscent of the famous Moe Green quote in “The Godfather”: “I buy you out, you don’t buy me out.”
Except, of course, this time Petitti and Sankey are the Dons of the sport.
What they said: “The (NCAA) Division 1 Council doesn’t work given what’s changing around us,” Sankey said. “I think the board of directors at the Division 1 level has to change, and has to change rapidly.”
What it means: Sankey has been unafraid to voice his NCAA frustration in the last year-plus. There are too many people involved in the process who have no business making decisions that impact power conferences like the Big Ten and SEC. The power conferences are barely represented on important committees, and it shows in the confusing decisions that come out of them.
It’s increasingly clear in Sankey’s public comments and his actions — like gathering a meeting with the Big Ten in Nashville — that he is going to get what he wants, one way or another. He’ll apply the public pressure of the two most powerful conferences in college sports and if that doesn’t work, there will always be the breakaway escape, though Sankey pushes back hard on that narrative whenever it comes up. Despite Sankey’s denials, the fear is real among other college sports leaders that that is where this could land. The Big Ten and SEC are done playing nice and just accepting bad decisions that come out of the NCAA governance model. The way things are trending, the NCAA could handle championships and not much else.
What they said: “The question is there a structure where the two league offices work together to create more of those matchups?” Petitti said. “We had a pretty big discussion about the path to play each other more — see if you can figure out how you can actually do it; decide what games you want, how many — but that’s a broad discussion.”
What it means: There should be more Big Ten and SEC games, but there are things still to be worked out. Whether in regular season like Michigan-Texas, which Sankey referenced Thursday, or the Rose Bowl last year between Michigan and Alabama, when the Big Ten and SEC meet each other on the field it means big interest and big TV ratings. There was some hope that the Nashville meeting could lead to a scheduling arrangement between the two conferences, but the two play an unequal amount of conference games (nine for Big Ten and eight for SEC) and there are other non-conference rivalry games built into annual schedules like South Carolina-Clemson and Kentucky-Louisville. It’ll take a little planning and creativity, but as the two conferences become more and more closely aligned, getting more games between them makes sense. There could be a greater interest, too, if there’s a CFP format shift to more automatic qualifiers.
What they said: “This just has to go incredibly well,” Sankey said about the first year of the 12-team playoff. “This has to be a successful launch. This isn’t the time to talk about governance in ’26 or the format in ’26, but immediate implementation is in front of us.”
What it means: If you mess this up, we’re taking more control. Sankey said Thursday the Big Ten and SEC didn’t have “unilateral” control over the future of the playoff format, but did have a defined role in shaping it moving forward. Everyone in the sport knows that the Big Ten and SEC could team up to host their own playoff and it would do monster TV ratings. Having a trump card like that allows the conferences to become increasingly emboldened in their demands. They already got a bigger cut of the playoff TV revenue and shaping the amount of teams and how they are picked is the logical next step.
The Big Ten likes the idea of more automatic qualifiers for it and the SEC. The SEC would be good with all at-large bids. There are selfish interests driving both those positions as the Big Ten could benefit from a guaranteed amount of teams while the SEC has long been bullish it could stack the field if there were zero automatic qualifiers. But it is clear that the two are keeping a close eye on what the selection committee does this year with the 12-team format. “I want to see the selection process, how it works, how the seeding works, how they evaluate and compare teams,” Petitti said. The faith in that group to get it right isn’t high, to put it mildly, even though both have been well represented in the previous four-team playoff model.
If it doesn’t go well, the Big Ten and SEC have signaled they’re in lock-step and are ready to take more control moving forward.
