BIG TEN: NO LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME IF COLLEGE FOOTBALL MOVES TO A 24-TEAM PLAYOFF
CHICAGO (AP) — The Big Ten Conference would do away with its championship game if college football adopts a 24-team playoff.
Commissioner Tony Petitti says that’s a worthwhile sacrifice to get his preferred postseason format.
“When we make this decision as a league – are we going to support 24 – that’s where you start the conversation,” Petitti said Tuesday as the Big Ten opened its football media days. “Are you willing to give up your championship game to have the expanded playoff?”
Pettiti mentioned this possibility back in May as he stepped up his push to double the 12-team playoff. He conceded a 24-team College Football Playoff would mean no Big Ten championship game, which has been held annually in Indianapolis since 2011.
“Yeah, I think it’s pretty much we won’t be playing a championship game if we go to 24,” he said.
The bid to expand the playoff to 24 teams also has the support of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 and Notre Dame. The Southeastern Conference remains a holdout.
During the SEC’s media days event last week, commissioner Greg Sankey cited the risk to conference championship games as one potential drawback of a 24-team format. The SEC was the first major conference to adopt a league championship game and held its first one in 1992.
Petitti noted the potential drawbacks a team would face when it enters the playoff after competing in a championship game.
“There’s a lot of conflicting incentives,” Petitti said. “It’s still very powerful to win a Big Ten championship, and teams play hard. They want to win that game. But you’re talking about a pretty tough journey to go all the way through and where you are playing next, and what happens if a team loses that game, they don’t get a bye, and they have to go play relatively quickly.”
Petitti also outlined his reasons for wanting a 24-team playoff rather than merely expanding to 16. He said it would assure that more late-season games carried postseason implications.
“The format creates all kinds of incentives,” Petitti said. “If you think about a 24-team playoff, right, a bunch of teams are going to be ranked between 16 and 24 that are just trying to make sure they’re in. You’re going to have teams playing until the very end to see if they’re in. You’re going to have teams playing to see if they can get a home game. So every game is going to matter because your seeding is always going to be determined by somebody else.”
While some SEC coaches such as Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Tennessee’s Josh Heupel have countered Sankey’s position by saying they’re intrigued by a 24-team playoff, Big Ten coaches seem universally behind Petitti.
“When you get a room of 50 coaches or whatever we have in this conference together, it’s hard to get everybody to be unanimous on something,” Southern California’s Lincoln Riley said. “This is something that our room has been unanimous on.”
Riley said the lack of a conference championship game would make this more like the NFL model, where people simply pay more attention to the national championship than anything else.
“I know obviously those (conference championship games) are huge revenue drivers for these conferences, which matters in this day and ae maybe a little bit more than it used to,” Riley said. “But to think that that could not be made up when you start adding in some of those playoff games…. I have a hard time believing that couldn’t be recouped, that these conferences can’t just decide the regular-season champion, have your tiebreaker structure or whatever and let’s get into the playoffs.”
The standoff between the Big Ten and the SEC represented the latest disagreement between college football’s two heavyweight conferences, but Petitti downplayed their off-field disagreements. He pointed out that he and Sankey had spoken over five separate times Tuesday morning while awaiting proposed changes to Congress’ Protect College Sports Act.
Petitti even said he’d like to see more SEC-Big Ten matchups similar to Ohio State’s trip to Texas and Oklahoma’s visit to Michigan this season.
But that couldn’t stop the Big Ten from crowing a bit about getting the upper hand the last few years.
As Petitti spoke to reporters, the last three College Football Playoff trophies were to his right, representing the national titles won by Big Ten members Michigan in 2023, Ohio State in 2024 and Indiana in 2025. Petitti noted the Big Ten also has the reigning champions in men’s basketball ( Michigan ) and women’s basketball ( UCLA ).
Illinois coach Bret Bielema, who coached in the SEC at Arkansas from 2013-17, offered the line of the day by saying SEC schools “kind of want to live in 2005 forever.”
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