Gene Smith, the longtime Ohio State athletic director, leaned in to share the story of one of the first meetings that the Big Ten athletic directors had with Tony Petitti this spring. Smith and his peers wanted to deliver a message to the new commissioner:
You gotta get close to Greg.
Yes, that would be Greg Sankey, commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, the league the Big Ten has butted heads with, on and off the field, over the past three years. The commissioner who famously clashed with previous Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren over a number of issues was now the person Warren’s replacement was encouraged to befriend.
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“I have a great relationship with Greg. I mean, I love the guy,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, they’re two great leaders in our industry, and we’re all facing the same issues.”
It’s no secret that relations between SEC and Big Ten leadership have been strained — to put it mildly — in recent years. But that changed in April, when the Big Ten hired Petitti as its commissioner. In the months since, Sankey and Petitti have met privately one-on-one and with their peers at commissioners’ meetings. They text regularly. Whatever angst and tension previously existed between the conferences appears to be thawing.
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“The SEC and Big Ten relationship is more important now than ever, with all that’s changing,” Sankey said. “I’ve had conversations and one-on-one meetings with Tony Pettiti already. Tony has a familiarity with us from his time at ABC and CBS. … I traveled to meet with (MLB commissioner) Rob Manfred a couple times and talked about common interests with baseball, and Tony was in a couple of those meetings.
“I really appreciate his outreach. I think he’s appreciated my outreach. I want to continue that dialogue. I think that we can collaborate in an effective way. We’re not always going to agree. Do they want to win games against us? Absolutely. Do we want to win games against them? Absolutely. But that doesn’t diminish our ability to work together in an effective way.”
The two richest college sports conferences will soon also become the two largest. Next summer, the Big Ten will balloon to 18 members and the SEC will grow to 16. At that point, the two most influential leagues will make up more than half the teams of what has been commonly referred to as the Power 5, which also encompasses members of the ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12 plus Notre Dame.
That term may quickly become obsolete, with the annual revenues of the two leagues projected to top $1 billion each by 2024, lapping the field. Power 2 seems more apt, especially if the Big Ten and SEC align their interests and their actions. Who else could lead but them? The NCAA’s helpless bystander role in conference membership and alignment feeds into the perception that nobody in college sports is actually in charge.
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“Well, I think the conferences are in charge,” Georgia president Jere Morehead said. “The Big Ten speaks for itself. The SEC speaks for itself. The ACC. The Big 12. Certainly the Pac-12 is having issues. But we’ve always operated historically under the notion that member institutions chose their conferences.”
The long and storied history of college athletics has been defined by its personalities as well as its money, and these two leagues are no exception. The battles between longtime SEC commissioner Mike Slive and longtime Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany were the stuff of legend, with each pushing and pulling the other to advance their own interests and those of college sports as a whole. Slive and Delany didn’t always agree, but when they worked together, they could make the world of collegiate athletics change.
Over the past three years, the relationship between the two conferences has been markedly different. Warren, who succeeded Delany in 2020, and Sankey, who succeeded Slive in 2015, butted heads on topics such as playing college football in 2020 and voted against one another on the subject of College Football Playoff expansion in the winter of 2021-22.
“We might see the world differently, but we always communicated,” Sankey said. “I even called him after (the Big Ten added USC and UCLA in) realignment, because we went through it the previous year. You don’t have many friends in that moment, so I called to visit with him. The fact that we had different perspectives is reality. But you go back, and there wasn’t one entity stopping Playoff expansion. Was I frustrated with colleagues that we weren’t able to identify and work clearly through issues? Yes. Yes. Have they been frustrated with me? Absolutely. That’s the way it works.”
Since Warren left the Big Ten to become the Chicago Bears’ president and CEO earlier this year, the two have seemingly let bygones be bygones. Warren texted Sankey about Sankey’s contract extension to congratulate him. The two crossed paths and conversed for a while at a colleague’s recent retirement party.
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Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman said he hopes and thinks that the relationship between the Big Ten and the SEC is improving. He knows both Petitti and Sankey fairly well and believes they understand that the two leagues share a lot of values.
“There’s a lot of shared interests and understanding of the prominent place that the Big Ten and the SEC both occupy in the college athletics landscape now,” Whitman said. “We would be remiss if we didn’t look for opportunities to try and collaborate with them and recognize that the responsibility that we have as conferences now is to try and look out for the best interests of the whole. I think it’s really incumbent upon us.”
What would it mean for college athletics if the two conferences were to collaborate on issues? “It could be transformative,” Whitman said.
“In some circles and on some topics, I think that’s a necessity,” he said. “In this cluttered landscape of college athletics with all the bureaucracy, with all the competing interests, with all the different areas that have proven very unwieldy to try and navigate, if our two conferences lock arms on some of these bigger issues, I think that may be the push that’s necessary to actually get some meaningful change created.”
Sankey himself said he believes an open line of communication between the two leaders and the two leagues would be helpful.
“I don’t over-predict some road map or direction,” Sankey said. “But I think talking about perspectives of the membership of each of our conferences, having strategic conversations, those are important. Some of this we’ll be compelled into; we’re co-defendants in lawsuits where we bring our lawyers in. But as we think through issues, I think I can be a resource to Tony on some of the history, and Tony can be a resource to me on fresh thinking. I think that’s mutually beneficial.”
Petitti said that he’s focused on collaborating with every Power 5 commissioner as well as Sankey because they’re all facing the same major issues these days, but that it does seem “kind of natural” for the Big Ten and SEC to work together because of the history of their programs, the size of their fan bases and how they’re situated in terms of membership. Both leagues have tremendous reach.
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“I might be new, but I represent something that’s very important, and that’s the Big Ten,” Petitti said. “The Big Ten has a lot of influence. People really rely on the Big Ten to lead, so we have to lead. That’s leadership inside the conference and also outside.”
Petitti said that the natural rhythm of meetings has led him and Sankey to build their rapport. They’ve crossed paths at CFP meetings and also at the twice-a-year Collegiate Commissioners Association (CCA) meetings. There are regular calls across Power 5 leadership and updates from each conference’s legal team.
“On top of that, we’ve been able to schedule time together,” Petitti said. “We’ve talked about lots of different topics, from history and how we got to today. Greg’s got a different background and real deep experience with a lot of governance issues. It’s great for me to hear about that.”
Beyond questions of NCAA governance is the issue of College Football Playoff expansion. Last year, the presidents who oversee the CFP officially approved the creation of a 12-team bracket, one that would include six automatic spots for the highest-ranked conference champions (in most years, the five Power 5 conference winners plus the best Group of 5 team) and six at-large teams. That was decided before the Pac-12 imploded and put the future of the conference in doubt; Sankey has already suggested that the CFP revisit its format in the wake of that development.
The two preeminent leagues now could, if they choose, essentially dictate what the format will be. That includes both for 2026 and beyond, when a broader reset of the CFP is expected in conjunction with its next media deal, and for the near term, as the first season of the 12-team CFP era begins in the fall of 2024. Other leagues expect the Big Ten and SEC to throw around their weight, pushing for more at-large access (which, history tells us, would mean more Big Ten and SEC teams included).
CFP revenue, which to date has been distributed evenly among Power 5 leagues regardless of participation in the four-team field, is expected to become an even more contentious issue in the changing landscape. Perhaps the leagues that send and advance the most teams through the postseason should get more money, similar to the way NCAA men’s basketball tournament units work. The size of the conferences will also likely factor into the calculations; the Big Ten having 18 members could mean a share equal to that of the SEC would actually pay out less money per school than the SEC dividing its share 16 ways and the ACC sharing its money 14 ways. There are ways to adjust this, and they will also be explored.
The Big Ten-SEC relationship also matters in terms of realignment and the future of college football. The two leagues are still competing against one another to be the very best and richest conference, but if that is more of a friendly competition than a blood sport, it could lead to less desire to devour others — like, say, the ACC, for the time being. Perhaps they will consider what’s best for the sport as a whole coming out of the wreckage of the Pac-12 — and perhaps that is a moratorium on further expansion.
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Together, they could help chart the future. Does major college football eventually get to a place where it can govern itself? Should it? How do those in charge of the enterprise now continue to defend it and sustain it? Can academics remain tied to a billion-dollar business? These are the questions that they can try to answer — better than the NCAA, or at minimum alongside president Charlie Baker. Many administrators and coaches across the country will be looking to them for guidance, and if the commissioners of the two most powerful conferences are on the same page, that’s vitally important.
“I understand commissioner Sankey has a very good relationship with the new Big Ten commissioner,” Morehead said. “I know commissioner Sankey is committed to the well-being of student-athletes, and I’m sure that’s the case with the Big Ten commissioner.”
Morehead was then asked how much of all this is about relationships: “I think a lot of it.”
There are also legal risks that come with too much collaboration, now that two conferences represent 34 total schools. So those critical relationships will need to walk a fine line between cooperation and collusion.
“Leadership needs to come together and find solutions,” Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts said. “Obviously, there’s legal risk to all that; we need to figure that out. But I think the Big Ten needs and wants the SEC to be real strong and all the conferences and vice versa. It doesn’t do us any good to try to make decisions in a vacuum. …
“We’ve got to save our sports. We can sit here in an isolated room and just only think about ourselves. Or we can say what’s in the best interest long term for college athletics.”
— The Athletic‘s Scott Dochterman contributed reporting.
(Photos for top illustration: Matthew Maxey, Michael Hickey / Getty Images)
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