When the Big Ten championship game kicks off next month, commissioner Tony Petitti will have been in charge of his league for 936 days.
In that time frame, he has brought in the few attractive remnants of the old Pac-12 at a cut rate to expand the conference to 18 members, polished off a handful of issues brought about by the Big Ten’s latest media rights deals and been present on the field for back-to-back football national titles courtesy of the conference’s biggest brands.
Petitti has also overseen a failed push to expand the College Football Playoff with a plethora of unwanted automatic bids, jumped on board the misguided move to add more teams to the NCAA tournament, schemed up a 24-team CFP expansion that’s been brushed off and messily navigated the Connor Stalions saga that nearly cost one of those eventual national championships, too. Now, a portion of his membership is in open revolt against the league office, which has raised more questions than answers about exactly what Petitti’s vision is.
If trying to grade what makes a well-received conference commissioner, Petitti’s track record is trending closer to former and short-lived Pac-12 boss George Kliavkoff than to highly regarded ex-SEC leader Mike Slive.
What’s worse for those with a rooting interest in the Big Ten, Petitti’s most recent questionable initiative has lost track of what really should matter in his job.
Instead of pushing private equity deals so schools can pay off stadium debts they can handle on their own, the Big Ten commissioner should be wholly focused on making sure the actual product on the field is getting better.
This latest fiasco is obscuring that, for as good as the league is at the top with two elite programs (Ohio State and Indiana) trending toward a pair of CFP quarterfinals, its middle and lower classes need much more than a payday loan to improve between the lines.
The chief investment officer for UC Investments announced Monday that a potential $2.4 billion deal with the conference was being put on hold due to concerns over “recent developments” that have surfaced. Not long after, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) sent a letter to a joint congressional committee that questioned the tax-exempt status of college sports in light of such a pursuit of private equity investors.
This is after USC athletic director Jennifer Cohen wrote a letter to Trojans fans questioning the deal last week, and a Michigan regent threatened to explore independence, just as another told the Associated Press that Petitti tried to strong-arm the school into accepting a deal the Wolverines had not fully vetted.
That’s a lot of self-inflicted messiness for a commissioner who is generally praised for his personal skills amid the swath of Big Ten presidents, ADs and coaches.
It’s also not what he should be threatening his schools over.
Petitti should be yelling as loudly as he can for his schools to double down on football. The conference may be home to the two top-ranked teams in the latest CFP standings, but there’s a non-zero chance that if USC upsets Oregon on Saturday, Ohio State and Indiana could be the only Big Ten teams in the playoff. Beyond those four programs, who is taking the most important sport to the Big Ten’s future as seriously as they should?
Fans of Maryland, Wisconsin, Rutgers and Michigan State are not the only ones wondering.
Not even holding up a big, golden cylinder for a third straight season can cover up the fact that the Big Ten’s depth is currently lacking. That traces directly back to a commissioner preoccupied with everything but the product itself. The league simply isn’t producing many compelling games for the casual viewer to tune into—further ceding ground to its Power 2 rival, the SEC. That should worry the man in charge far more than forming new holding companies.
Just look at this past weekend, when UCLA and its interim coaching staff were offered up as the prime-time NBC game, the latest sacrifice for the top-ranked Buckeyes. CBS, which has been trying (and failing) to send lead analyst Gary Danielson out on a high note, drew Penn State at Michigan State for a time slot that had been appointment viewing but is now questionable at best since shifting allegiances to the Big Ten.
We’re approaching the penultimate weekend of the 2025 college football season and the Big Ten has seen just one program—Ohio State in its opener against Texas on Fox—draw more than 10 million viewers, according to data from Sports Media Watch. The ACC has double that number, and the SEC is lapping the field with seven different programs involved in a game that averaged 10-plus million viewers.
Lowering the bar and focusing just on conference-only games paints an even more dispiriting view. There are 19 SEC league games that averaged more than five million viewers this season. The Big Ten? A paltry eight.
If you’re an advertiser, media company or, yes, large institutional investor, 129 years of history and some large fan bases at various state universities only go so far in the face of that kind of disparity in this attention economy.
For Petitti to really deliver big wins for his schools, the conference needs to pursue winning with greater fervor so that he doesn’t have to sell a chunk off the top of future revenues to keep bridging the gap to the SEC.
The Big Ten is boring this season, and that’s not something that sells in the short or long term.
Where are the bold moves from the conference? Where is the leadership to poke and prod the league’s teams along? Why are ACC schools talking about institutional investment in their football program with a greater degree of excitement than the schools from the conference where that should be the norm? How is it that the coaching carousel is spinning and not one bold name is being connected to a certain league that badly needs an infusion of new ideas?
The Big Ten should be about private quarterback coaches, not private equity. There should be a focus on delivering ratings, not on retreads being put in charge of football programs. Staff salary pools, not the commissioner’s, should be the focus moving forward. Petitti should be on the phone with every regent and booster from coast to coast, trying to sell them a slice of pie and not trying to sell one off to entities that don’t move the needle beyond the balance sheet.
Winning will beget more winning and that’s the only way to guarantee a real return of all of the dollars and cents that come with it.
If Petitti wants to really do something meaningful as commissioner and restore a little luster to his reputation before his 1,000th day in office, he can stop the behind-the-scenes side deals and make sure his conference is doing everything it can to improve on the field next season.
Focus on that and the rest will follow in the Big Ten.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Big Ten’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Money.
