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Hello from Big Ten Football Media Days in Chicago!
I am writing this as we wait for day two to begin.
Ohio State (Ryan Day, Julian Sayin, Jeremiah Smith and Jaylen McClain) will be here along with Minnesota, Michigan State, Purdue, UCLA and Oregon.
That means you can look for much Ohio State content at BuckeyeInsiders.com, BuckeyeSports.com and PressProsMagazine.com starting this afternoon and certainly long into the evening.
For Day 1, I was focused on what Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti had to say.
Most of his 37 minutes at the mic were a slog thanks to his having to talk about the legislation in Congress that probably isn’t going to pass, but he did further expand on the league’s position on expanding the College Football Playoff and the potential for power leagues to “break away” from the rest.
On the CFP:
“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.”
This is a key distinction because I remain very skeptical they will actually get as much money from their media parters as they think they need to pull the trigger on this.
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As far as NCAA upheaval, a topic of conversation thanks to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and others saying that league would seriously entertain going it alone if necessary, Petitti poured some cold water on that.
“It's not breakaway, but is there another path where if you can't solve it in the bill [in the Senate], and if you can't solve it with your colleagues, is there some path where you have to have conference-based rules? That’s not necessarily breaking away. It doesn't mean you're not going to play anybody else. But is there a path to have rules that we can at least operate from the conference? That's also really difficult.”
I am not a fan of Petitti, but this part makes sense.
The SEC is not going to go it alone because it would lose lots of money, and they are going to be hard-pressed to make their own rules because if they do it could create many loopholes for other leagues to do different things (such as approve larger NIL payments and “salary caps” and different recruiting tactics) that would put it at a competitive disadvantage.
“I think like breakaway is a word that creates a lot of emotion. I've never heard that anybody doesn’t want to play anybody else. We want to schedule more good games that our fans expect. We just got to get to a system that allows us to do that. And I know, to be fair, after (Sankey’s) comments, I know the last couple of days when he addressed it, it seemed like he was sort of pointing out that maybe the reaction to it wasn’t quite what meant.”
Here is my Press Pros column on Petitti’s playoff comments.
You can find much more on my my YouTube channel, Facebook page (here) and both Buckeye Insiders and BuckeyeSports.com.
And of course you can look for lots of Ohio State content at those places later today and tomorrow!
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