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\n Photo: Joe Robbins\/Icon Sportswire\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
The college football<\/a> season begins this Saturday with a matchup between No. 17 Kansas State and No. 22 Iowa State, colloquially known as \u201cFarmageddon.\u201d The game will take place in Dublin, Ireland, the logical place for any college football season to begin. (Perhaps the idea is that Farmageddon will stave off any future potato famines?)<\/p>\n For those who have been unable to stop their head from spinning following all the dramatic changes that have landed on college football over the last half-decade \u2014 realignment, expanded playoffs, unlimited transfers, revenue sharing, Name, Image and Likeness payments to players \u2014 you may be surprised to find that college football, on the whole, looks mostly like it did last year. There are small changes, sure: they\u2019ve tweaked the playoff seeding; teams get fewer time outs in overtime; Dave Portnoy<\/a> (of all people) is going to be a part of the FOX pregame show. But college football didn\u2019t spend the entire offseason tearing itself down to the studs the way it has done so often in recent years. But that consistency is not going to last. And the chaos ahead comes from a most unlikely source: The Big Ten Conference.<\/p>\n As a proud alum of a Big Ten school \u2014 someday I hope to start an Illini collective with the Hot Ones guy<\/a> \u2014 I can confirm that the conference has always thought itself a little bit better than everyone else: more principled, more academic. The Big Ten is full of Michigan Men, Medill graduates and generally upstanding citizens, or at least that was its imsage. Remember, this was the conference that canceled the football season in August 2020<\/a> because \u201cwe\u2019re going to do what\u2019s best for the health and wellness of our student-athletes.\u201d (They would almost immediately reverse course once the SEC went full-speed ahead.) Even as the conference expanded to a cartoonishly large 18 teams\u2014conference mates Oregon and Rutgers are 2,460 miles from each other\u2014it still kept that sense of removed superiority, too high-minded for those glorified legacy bootleggers down South but still more than capable of stacking together national championships. The Big Ten was seen, not least of all by itself, as the soul of college athletics, and even an avatar for the soul of America. And for years, former commissioner Jim Delaney kept the league two steps ahead of everyone else, securing big money from the Big Ten Network and its schools\u2019 vast alumni base and geographic footprint.<\/p>\n But now the Big Ten has a new commissioner in Tony Petitti, who is a man of television, not college sports. And just like that, the conference is trying to blow up its whole reputation. In fact, the Big Ten appears dead set on becoming college athletics\u2019 primary villain.<\/p>\n Petitti\u2019s central organizing principle is that the only important thing in college sports is the field he understands better than anything else: television inventory. (It is, after all, why he was hired.) It has guided every move the league has made under his watch, from expansion to signing multiple contracts with multiple networks to the move that could blow up college athletics for good. Last year, Petitti proposed a new version of the College Football Playoff \u2014 which just expanded in 2024<\/a>, remember \u2014 that would have specifically, and exclusively, rewarded the Big Ten and the SEC, the two largest and most powerful conferences, giving them guaranteed spots in the field unavailable to the ACC, the Big 12 and the Group of Five conferences. (Those teams would have to compete for at-large spots that the Big Ten could also swoop up.) The reasoning behind this had nothing to do with competitive balance, or even making the tournament more attractive or lucrative. Petitti wanted to do it simply so that his conference could hold play-in games for the CFP during the first weekend of December. In other words, so that there would be television inventory for his league to sell.<\/p>\n The plan was so brazen and self-serving that not only did the Big 12 and ACC lose their minds over it \u2014 the proposal explicitly secured their place as second-class citizens \u2014 the SEC, which would stand to benefit from it, didn\u2019t support it either. The reason was obvious to anyone who knew more about college athletics than television production: Such a model would make the regular season (the lifeblood of college football, the soul of the whole sport) mostly pointless and render 80 percent of college football teams irrelevant. But Petitti and the Big Ten didn\u2019t care about that. Because the proposal would make them more money.<\/p>\n Petitti has been rebuffed in his efforts, (for now<\/a>, but he hardly seems deterred. Last week, he floated an even more expanded playoff<\/a>. This one would go up to 28 teams, seven of them reserved for the Big Ten with the possibility of two more at-large bids, which would mean, conceivably, half the league would make the playoffs, a notion that is the opposite of everything college football has ever valued but very much in the spirit of professional sports, which Petitti says he wants to emulate<\/a>. If it sounds like Petitti is willing to burn down all of college athletics just to make the Big Ten more money, that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening: It is, after all, what the conference hired him to do.<\/p>\n The reason he can do this, of course, is that no one is in charge of college football anymore. The NCAA, after years of getting beaten up in the courts, has essentially abdicated any leadership role, which leaves people like Petitti \u2014 or, more accurately, the television executives paying his league and its schools so much money \u2014 as the primary power brokers of the sport. (That SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, a longtime perceived villain to college sports fans himself, has been the primary bulwark against the Big Ten\u2019s expansionist plans speaks to how dire the situation has become.) This is exactly how you turn college football \u2014 which is beloved precisely because it isn\u2019t the NFL \u2014 into minor league football, and how you send the sport down a path from which it cannot return. The people with the most power in college football right now \u2014 which makes them the people with the most power in college sports \u2014 care only about getting what they can, while they can, without any regard to the possible long-term consequences. The ground is always unstable: There are always more things to blow up. Maybe the Big Ten really is the avatar for America after all.<\/p>\n