NFL News NFL News, Reports and Updates
ATLANTA — Tony Petitti descended a small flight of stairs from a temporary stage to the turf field inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium late Monday night with a smile on his face and flecks of championship confetti dotting his vest adorned with the Big Ten Conference logo.
Not quite two years had passed since Petitti took the job as the Big Ten commissioner. At that point, the conference was already, by many measures, one of the two most influential in college sports, alongside the Southeastern Conference. But by one scoreboard, one conference was supremely ahead.
A Big Ten team had not won college football’s national championship in nine years, and only twice in the previous 21. The SEC, meanwhile, had claimed 13 of the last 17 national championships.
Head coach Ryan Day and the Ohio State Buckeyes hoist the trophy after beating the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 34-23, in Atlanta on Monday.
Petitti was smiling Monday perhaps because that SEC stranglehold on college football may at last be loosening. Deep in the heart of SEC country, Ohio State had just beaten Notre Dame, 34-23, to win the College Football Playoff’s national championship game, the second consecutive season that ended with a Big Ten team victorious, following Michigan last season.
“I think this is the greatest run in college football history, what Ohio State did, what happened last year (with Michigan) to be undefeated, both those two,” Petitti told NBC News. “I feel like this year it was a new format so you’ve got to win more games and who they had in front of them and the way they had to do it, it’s incredibly impressive.”
The sport’s power dynamic did not dramatically shift Monday night; the Big Ten and SEC continue to have the most money in the bank and power in the boardroom among all college conferences. Yet symbolically, this was also the…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/one-conferences-stranglehold-college-football-182333706.html
Author : NBC News
Publish date : 2025-01-21 20:48:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
