The Big Ten’s big mouths have lost the narrative war to the SEC so badly, it’s a small miracle when anything attributable to a Big Ten source these days isn’t accompanied by a laugh track.
The league’s latest misstep wasn’t even intended for public consumption. Yet somehow, it ended with Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti stumbling into another public spanking while his counterpart at the SEC, Greg Sankey, continued to walk between raindrops and let everyone else feel the splashback.
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Sources around the Big Ten insist that its absurd proposal to expand the College Football Playoff to 28 teams wasn’t really a proposal at all but something more akin to a late-night, three-bourbons-down conversation that shouldn’t have left the group chat in the first place.
Still, the fact it saw the light of day — without Petitti immediately disowning it and the SEC one-upping him yet again by announcing last week that it would make the wildly popular move to nine conference games in 2026 — showed that the competition between the two heaviest hitters in college sports isn’t really a fair fight.
The Big Ten may have won the last two national titles, but in terms of long-term strategy and message discipline, there’s no comparison. While the Big Ten looks like an out-of-touch corporate monolith trying to tell us that an 8-4 team should compete for a national title, the SEC sits back, watches their competitor’s sweat drip for a little while and yells “checkmate” when they know it’ll hurt the most.
Remember earlier this year when it seemed like the Big Ten and SEC were going to jointly champion a 16-team playoff format with each of them getting four automatic bids? Once Sankey saw where the wind was blowing, he was more than happy to leave Petitti on Public Relations Disaster Island.
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Well, it’s…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/college-football/article/how-the-big-ten-lost-the-narrative-war-to-the-sec-133824947.html
Author : Dan Wolken
Publish date : 2025-08-26 13:38:00
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