For more than a year, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has been spearheading an interesting campaign.
Pitted against each other are two frameworks for the College Football Playoff beginning in 2026. Both expand the playoff from 12 to 16 teams, but they have wildly different methods for populating the bracket.
In one corner is the aptly named “5+11” model, in which the five highest-ranked conference champions automatically qualify for the playoff, while the CFP selection committee would pick the remaining 11 spots. This format is openly favored by the vast majority of schools and conferences around the country.
Across the ring is Petitti’s version.
Rather than have only five automatic qualifiers, this plan would have 13 — four from the Big Ten, four from the SEC, two each from the ACC and Big 12, and one from the Group of 6. Only three spots would be left over, filled by the highest-ranked teams that remain after the automatic bids.
This “4+4+2+2+1+3” plan, hereon referred to as the Petitti plan for obvious reasons, appears to have the support of every head coach and athletic director in the Big Ten, but notably lacks the support of the public, the media and every other conference.
Although the SEC has flipped its commitment, it was originally on board with this format. Before entering this summer, the nation’s two top conferences had one common enemy: the CFP selection committee.
The SEC’s gripe with the decision-making body emerged during last year’s playoff. Multiple SEC teams had just missed the mark, with conference officials believing the selection committee hadn’t properly considered the challenge of playing in the southern league. As a result, inter-conference meetings between the Big Ten and SEC in the spring left officials optimistic that the Petitti plan would become a reality by their December 1 deadline.
“A committee is not ideal to choose a postseason,” Florida AD Scott Stricklin said in May. “I question whether it is appropriate for college football.”
The Big Ten’s problem with the CFP selection committee is the opposite of the SEC’s. Where the SEC feels it doesn’t get enough credit in bracket-building, the Big Ten feels its southern neighbor gets more credit than deserved.
This is based on a fundamental difference between the two college football powerhouses — the Big Ten plays nine conference games while the SEC, until last week, only played eight. As a result, the Big Ten believes that it is at a disadvantage when the selection committee is looking at regular-season records.
“We want to better connect the regular season and the postseason,” Petitti said at Big Ten Media Days in July. “A critical goal of any post-season format, regardless of sport, is to keep as many teams alive as deep into the season as possible. We want more conference games to matter in November.
“With 18 schools and nine conference [games], we’re losing nine more games to start. At the end of the day, I think it’s really relevant.”
Troy Dannen, Nebraska’s athletic director, spoke to the media on Aug. 8. In response to a question about Nebraska cancelling its home-and-home series against the SEC’s Tennessee, he referenced the steps the Big Ten has to take to overcome this supposed SEC schedule advantage.
“You have to schedule to get into the postseason. You have to,” Dannen said to the media weeks before the SEC announcement. “And I don’t care if we haven’t been close to it — that’s where we want to be. That’s how we have to schedule. So we’ll schedule in what is optimal to get into the postseason.”
The Big Ten believed that the SEC had a decision to make: either expand to nine conference games or agree to the Petitti plan.
But entering this summer, SEC leaders seemed unwilling to make their regular-season schedules one game harder. Former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts cited distrust in the selection committee’s decisions as a reason for not expanding the SEC’s schedule.
“If we’re not confident that the decision-making about who gets in and why and what are the metrics around it, it’s going to be really hard for some of my colleagues to get to the nine games,” Alberts said, now the AD at Texas A&M.
As the months progressed, it became clear that the SEC was rapidly moving towards the “5+11” plan that the Big 12 and ACC had already fully backed. Then last week, the SEC pulled the rug out from under the Big Ten.
On Aug. 21, the SEC announced that it would be moving to a nine-game conference schedule in 2026. Maybe the SEC finally saw the light and gave in to the Big Ten’s demands. Or it realized that its schools have to pay their $20.5 million revenue-sharing bill somehow, and conference games mean higher ticket prices. Either way, the Big Ten now lacks its only bargaining chip for deciding the new College Football Playoff format.
The Power Four has until December to decide on a CFP framework. While there had been a time when either proposed format had a chance of becoming reality, the SEC’s Aug. 21 announcement may have been the final nail in the Petitti plan’s coffin.