Big Ten Media Days are back in downtown Chicago at the Hilton, recalling days of old while new ideas of expanding the playoffs won’t go away. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
Tony Petitti continues pushing playoff expansion whether there is the money or the fan appetite for it or not.
Chicago, IL — Big Ten Football Media Days began Tuesday at the Chicago Hilton, a hotel built in 1927 on Michigan Avenue not far from the shore of Lake Michigan.
With ornate vaulted ceilings, intricate murals, Italian marble columns, giant crystal chandeliers and multiple massive ballrooms, the building is clearly a product of the Roaring 20s when we still erected buildings with beauty in mind.
This event has been held here a few times before, and I’ve always envisioned it as a place Al Capone might feel at home.
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I’ve never looked into whether or not he might have actually been here, but the famed South Side mobster probably didn’t want most of his “business” to be public anyway.
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Perhaps, even if he did once stalk these hallways, it’s been lost to history.
Capone could have had adversaries rubbed out in one of the 3,000 rooms without anyone ever knowing. That’s the way gangsters operated to stay ahead of the law.
Tony Petitti, on the other hand, is trying to kill college football right out in the open.
Over the past year, the Big Ten commissioner made no secret of his desire to overhaul the sport’s postseason, replacing the 12-team playoff with a 24-squad model — tradition be damned — and he did not back down Tuesday.
Clearly emboldened by support from coaches and executives from other leagues, including the Big 12 and ACC, Petitti said “a number of reasons” exist for fans to not fear a 24-team playoff wrecking the aura of the only riveting regular season left in American sports.
The first was his experience as a deputy commissioner for Major League Baseball, which unnecessarily swelled its postseason to 12 teams in 2022.
That also brought with it farcical best-of-three series that can erase a full season’s worth of excellence in 48 hours, devaluing The Big 162 that has long been embraced as necessary proving ground for baseball teams. Baseball’s long summer is not unlike the way college football teams traditionally need to exhibit some staying power from September through December to earn the right to keep playing.
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“I totally understand the difference,” Petitti said, unconvincingly, when asked about fans who might be concerned about such a large playoff disrupting the week-to-week urgency that makes college football unique.
“The idea is keeping as many teams in contention for as long as possible. Play as many meaningful games for as long as you can.”
That actually has some merit, but there’s problem with the argument: We already did that with the expansion from four teams to 12, a move that means every single Power 4 conference team controls its destiny to start every season and can weather at least one if not two losses. (Perhaps maybe even a third one of these years…)
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti at last year’s Media Days in Las Vegas said a lot of the same things then that he said Tuesday in Chicago.
Petitti claimed top 10 teams will still have urgency to keep winning, though that is debatable at best since those squads will safely be in the field in the final month barring a total collapse. And rarely will much difference exist between being ranked No. 1 or 8 (as long as you get a bye) when it comes to who they draw in their first playoff game.
In a strange contradiction, Petitti also said the presence of the CFP Selection Committee will help maintain drama by leaving some ambiguity to where teams will be seeded up until the final Sunday selection show.
“So every game is going to matter because your seeding is always going to be determined by somebody else,” he said. “It’s not the NFL where your record tells you where you are in the division. This is something different. This is going to be seeded by a committee. You’re always playing.”
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That’s an ironic about-face from a commissioner and coaches who were just a year ago at this very event advocating for an even more ludicrous playoff setup with automatic bids to de-emphasize a committee they felt (with some merit) couldn’t be trusted to pick the playoff teams now.
But I suppose consistency isn’t important once you’ve set your sights on something that neither makes sense nor is popular with fans.
In that case, just dismissing their concerns is much more simple, and that is exactly what Petitti did.
College football fans like the 12-team playoff, a system that allows enough participants to determine a true national champion.
“I know there’s things out there we get asked all the time, ‘This fan poll said this. This poll said that,’” Petitti said. “I’m confident we’ll fill our stadiums, and we will have really large audiences watching these games if we expand.”
Why he is confident in this is unclear.
Already about half the first-round games in the 12-team playoff are nothing to write home about, and their value is questionable considering ESPN owns the rights to them all but pays another network — TNT Sports — to broadcast some of them instead.
What that should tell us is there’s not much, if any, money to be made on those games or ESPN would want to keep them for itself.
And money matters a lot, of course.
In fact, it’s the only thing that might prevent the playoff from growing to 24 teams.
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“I think there’s been a lot of movement among coaches and ADs around the country that 24 is the right number, but we have to see if it has the right value, and we have to understand that process and how we schedule it and when,” Petitti said.
That was an an acknowledgement TV networks might not come through with enough money to actually make expansion worthwhile.
In another bit of irony, Petitti claimed expanding the playoff would be a reward for teams investing more cash in their rosters in the days of name, image and likeness payments. (Because winning isn’t motivation enough?)
That might be the most preposterous position of them all. … And yet one might say it was appropriate to take such a posture on the same day Ohio State and Notre Dame both announced multi-million dollar deals to have advertisements placed on their jerseys — from massive national fiscal institutions (SoFi and Chase Bank), no less.
The “value” nugget was tucked neatly and discreetly into Petitti’s 37 minutes at the mic Tuesday but might have been the most important one.
With empty suits like Petitti coming from the pros to propel college football into the abyss that swallowed them long ago in the eyes of many college sports fans who self-selected for something less nakedly commercial, lack of leadership is now sometimes better than the type that’s actually available.
In this case, the value of more playoff games might not exceed the amount of money lost by giving up conference championship games, particularly in the Big Ten and the SEC, leaving Petitti and his ilk to settle for the status quo.
If it works out that way and the CFP remains at 12 teams — or grows to only 16 — I guess we’ll have to take our wins when we can.
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