Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com
The Big Ten and SEC want to overhaul the College Football Playoff for 2026 – and they’re focused on making regular-season games matter more than anything else when determining who gets in.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti laid out his vision during a conversation with Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt this week. He’s pushing for a system that rewards conference performance first, similar to how pro sports leagues operate.
“I want more teams to feel like they’re chasing that opportunity to compete for a national championship,” Petitti explained. “Teams can get hot late in the season. The fact they lose a game early shouldn’t disqualify them. To play more meaningful conference games as late as possible.”
The Big Ten’s on a roll right now. Michigan claimed the national title in 2023, and Ohio State followed it up with their own championship last season.
Petitti admitted he can’t hide his emotions during non-conference matchups. “It’s a really interesting job, when you’re playing conference games, you’re kind of stone-faced, you’re on the sideline and you can’t indicate any emotion,” he said. “When you get into these nonconference games, you’re living and dying like the people on campus are. The more we win, apparently the more IQ points you get.”
Conference dominance was on full display last season when the Big Ten sent a nation-leading four teams to the playoff – conference champ Oregon plus at-large selections Ohio State, Penn State, and Indiana.
Conference Record Is King
“We believe strongly conference record is like the backbone of all that,” Petitti emphasized. “How you play during the season (should) qualify you based off conference record.”
With 17 teams now in the Big Ten, scheduling has become a nightmare. Some teams never face each other during the nine-game conference slate, creating unbalanced schedules.
That’s why Petitti supports playoff “play-in” games during championship weekend — it gives the selection committee more data points to work with.
Indiana’s playoff berth last season highlighted this problem. The Hoosiers dodged many top Big Ten opponents and finished without beating a single ranked team, yet still made the field.
The Big Ten’s ideal playoff model? Sixteen teams with automatic bids for four Big Ten teams, four SEC teams, two ACC teams, two Big 12 teams, one Group of Five team, and three at-large selections.
Petitti isn’t attacking the selection committee’s work. “We’ll stipulate the committee does the best job they can. This is not to say the committee doesn’t do a good job… they make incredibly difficult decisions based on data,” he said.
The real issue is cross-conference comparison. “This year in the Big Ten, we’ll crossover, I think we play four Big 12 games, three SEC, three ACC and two Notre Dame games… That’s not a lot of conference play among us with a body (of work).”
“When you start comparing teams that don’t have a head to head and you have very little data to look at between leagues, that becomes really difficult.”
Petitti believes losing non-conference games shouldn’t kill a team’s playoff chances — it might affect seeding, but not “access.” He’s pushing for more blockbuster non-conference matchups, like the Week 1 showdown between Texas and Ohio State that has fans drooling.
Klatt summed it up perfectly: college football needs to move toward an “access-based” playoff model that relies less on committee opinions and more on clear qualification paths. This would keep more fanbases engaged deeper into the season as their teams chase defined playoff benchmarks.
