Big Ten, SEC Take Next Step Toward Control Over College Football

The conferences can further shape the playoff as they see fit and plot ways to further gerrymander the selection process in their favor.

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey seemingly want their conferences to take on more control in college football. / Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

—One of the rewritten commandments in George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm.

If college football has gone to the pigs, then there are two Napoleons in the sport right now—Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti. The commissioners of the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten, respectively, seem to be strategically working toward the kind of totalitarian takeover that happened in Orwell’s 1945 work. The next step could come next week, as their leagues discuss decisions that affect the whole of the sport but are likely to be made in the best interests of themselves.

Animal Farm was an allegorical satire about Joseph Stalin turning the zeitgeist of the 1917 Russian Revolution into a ruthless power grab as ruler of the Soviet Union. The pigs lead an overthrow of the humans, then find that they like being in charge. They turn their utopian farm—which was built on the credo “All Animals Are Equal”—into another iteration of corrupt authority. The commandments of the farm are rewritten, with Napoleon as the authoritarian leader of a porcine ruling class.

Here in the college athletic world, NCAA rule (the Romanov dynasty, if you will) has been largely overthrown and replaced with conference autonomy. And within that revolutionary leadership cabal, the SEC and the Big Ten are consolidating power—to the detriment of everyone else. It started with realignment raids on the Big 12 and Pac-12, triggering major revenue disparities, and it hasn’t ended there.

There is an Oct. 10 meeting in Nashville for administrators from both leagues, per multiple media reports. This is under the guise of a Big Ten-SEC “advisory group” formed last February, which immediately made the hair stand up on the backs of the necks of everyone outside those leagues. Apex predators coming together doesn’t tend to go well for those further down the food chain.

The announcement was couched in airy, non-threatening language about the “challenges” facing college sports: “These challenges, including but not limited to recent court decisions, pending litigation, a patchwork of state laws, and complex governance proposals, compel the two conferences to take a leadership role in developing solutions for a sustainable future of college sports.”

Yeah, they’ll discuss the House v. NCAA legal settlement at this meeting. Probably some other issues. They’ll also get serious about taking more control of college football away from the rest of the FBS.

Among the non-“challenging” items that will be discussed: future scheduling agreements between the Big Ten and SEC and “their preference for automatic bids in the next iteration of the College Football Playoff,” according to ESPN.

What’s at stake: the SEC and Big Ten further rigging the playoff in their favor, when they already have all the advantages. They don’t need to further manipulate the system, but they’re prepared to do it. And they’ve already been handed the power to make decisions for everyone.

To quickly recap: We have an agreed-upon format for a 12-team playoff for this season and next, but nothing beyond that is ironclad in a contract with ESPN that runs from 2026 to ’32. At present, there are automatic bids for five conference champions and seven at-large bids, with the near-certainty that four of those automatic spots will go to the champions of the SEC, Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big 12. The fifth automatic bid goes to the highest-ranked champion of the Group of 5 conferences.

The Big Ten and SEC already test-drove their playoff power grab last February. Among the ideas proposed: expansion to 14 teams, with automatic top-two seeds for their conferences; at least three guaranteed playoff bids for the Big Ten and SEC, with two each for the ACC and Big 12; and Petitti himself pushing for four automatic bids for his league and the SEC. 

It was a brazenly obnoxious proposal. Two leagues scared to compete despite already having major advantages across the board. That tempest went underground for a while, but in March two significant decisions were made by the College Football Playoff Management Committee, which consists of the commissioners of every conference plus Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua: 

• Unequal playoff revenue sharing tilted in favor of the Big Ten and SEC.
• Control over the future format of the CFP from 2026–32 was largely ceded to the Big Ten and SEC (with ESPN an involved partner).

The second of those two developments probably didn’t get the attention it deserved at the time. It could be coming home to roost now.

Why would the rest of the leagues agree to such a strong-arm move? Because they clearly perceived a threat that the Big Ten and SEC could break away entirely, killing the sport as a national entity once and for all.

So control was ceded. And now those two leagues will decide what’s best for everyone—meaning what’s best for themselves.

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

—Squealer, Napoleon’s propagandist in Animal Farm.

This Nashville meeting sounds like the next stage of the takeover. The Big Ten and SEC can further shape the playoff as they see fit—three automatic bids for each league seems like a plausible starting point, perhaps with two apiece for the Big 12 and ACC. And they can also plot ways to further gerrymander the selection process in their favor.

There have been complaints with the subjectivity of the CFP selection committee—which, hey, they are humans, there will be subjectivity. It hasn’t been perfect, but it hasn’t been a catastrophe, either. And it won’t be in a 12-team playoff, with less pressure on every selection.

But in an era of bigger conferences and almost assuredly more losses for top teams—something the leagues did to themselves, by the way—the Big Ten and SEC want strength of schedule to matter more. And they don’t seem to trust a broadly representative human panel to discern between winning percentage and playing tougher teams. So why not bypass the people in favor of gaming the schedule system?

This is where an agreement between the two conferences to play each other more could come into play. If the Big Ten and SEC play nonconference games against each other, it helps their strength of schedule—and potentially hurts the other leagues who are no longer getting games against those two. Voila, they’ve baked in an SOS advantage at the expense of everyone else.

Then you feed the numbers into a set of computers that spit out the majority of the bids for the SEC and Big Ten, and the two commissioners can shrug and say, “This is what the computers have produced. Objectivity rules.”

The most ridiculous aspect of all this is that the SEC and Big Ten don’t need to legislate an advantage into the playoff format. They’re going to get the most teams in, almost every year. There may be the rare occasion when the ACC or Big 12 is worthy of three or more bids each, but if the current selection process holds then the Big Ten and SEC regularly will get seven or more bids. 

The fact they don’t trust themselves or the system enough to let it play out more fairly is a telling commentary on the lust for control. Don’t earn it on the field, write it into the rules.

And so the stranglehold is poised to get tighter.

The Big Ten and SEC seem to be operating under the theory that the best way to usurp power is to do it gradually—take a little here and a little there, so as not to arouse alarm. By the time they’ve fully assumed control, it’s too late for their competitors to do something about it. 

In Animal Farm, the pigs took the milk and apples for themselves while spinning a lie to the masses. Squealer put it this way: 

“You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”

Fill the conference tables with milk and apples in Nashville next week. The Big Ten and SEC are about to get fatter.