Tone Deaf Tony’s hearing seems to be improving.
The commissioner of the Big Ten, Tony Petitti, spent months failing to hear the college football world’s loud-and-clear message: Nobody liked his payoff proposals. Not the 16-team model with the four automatic bids for the Big Ten and the SEC, with two apiece for the Big 12 and ACC, plus one for a Group of 6 champion and three at-large bids. Not the 24-team or 28-team trial balloons that also would feature more automatic bids for the Big Ten and SEC than anyone else. Not his desire to mess with the regular season in order to create a round of intra-conference play-in games.
Petitti’s efforts on behalf of primary broadcast partner Fox Sports have gotten him nowhere. And now his approach appears to have changed.
Multiple sources confirm to what Yahoo Sports reported Wednesday, that a working group of athletic directors from the Power 4 conferences is being organized to potentially explore CFP formats for 2026 and beyond. Yahoo added this detail: “Several Big Ten school administrators are socializing a concept to grant each power conference league an equal number of automatic qualifiers in a field of more than 20 teams.”
Still sounds stupid. But it also strikes a very different tone.
Lo and behold, some folks in the Big Ten may actually be warming to the concept of treating all Power 4 conferences with a measure of equality when it comes to playoff access. Not full equality, of course—the Big Ten and SEC still have the highest share of revenue and the most control over format—but something closer to it. Something like four bids apiece for all four power leagues, as part of a 24- or 28-team playoff.
Forced humility. It’s a heck of a thing.
“Maybe [Petitti] is realizing you need friends in this industry,” posits one power-conference athletic director on Thursday. “Hard to do anything on your own.”
It still seems unlikely that the Big Ten has willingly embraced a new spirit of sharing. This isn’t a revelation of generosity; it’s a retreat to it.
This is a result of everyone else swatting back the Big Ten’s power plays and chronic bad ideas. The Big 12 and ACC locked arms against the multi-automatic bid plan, and then the SEC bailed on the concept in the spring based on feedback from its coaches. Those three leagues favored a 16-team model with five automatic bids—one for each power conference, plus one for the Group of 6—and 11 at-larges.
The Big Ten resisted, and stasis set in. That remains the case after CFP meetings in Chicago this week, where the future format was only a brief topic of conversation. With a Dec. 1 deadline to set the format for 2026, the ongoing gridlock heightens the likelihood that the playoff will remain at 12 teams for at least one more year.
Still, the leaders of the sport left open a side door to last-minute expansion, starting with the potential formation of the AD working group. This isn’t a sport that gets anything done in 60 days, but the opportunity is there.
One way to bring everyone to the table is to offer more access to more people. The Big 12 and the ACC athletic director spots aren’t filled with naive hayseeds who think the Big Ten suddenly respects them more and thus wants to double their number of automatic bids; they know what this is about. In a word, bribery.
But who knows, maybe leagues that are at a disadvantage can be bought if the price is right. And this is a pretty juicy price. The Big Ten finally read the room and concluded that sharing the sugar might be its best hope.
My hope is that the SEC remains unimpressed and unmoved, withholding its support and preventing playoff gigantism. The best CFP would remain free of the following:
Multiple automatic bids for any conference. Win a power league, get a bid. Everyone else in the conference has to earn their way in on merit based against the rest of the field, not via executive fiat based on conference membership.Anything more than 16 teams. The world is not clamoring for 20-plus competitors playing for the national championship—there is no groundswell of support for such a thing. Yeah, the FCS playoff has 24 teams, but nobody regards that as the perfect postseason. College football fans have been buffaloed into accepting a lot in the name of revenue generation, but this may be a bridge too far.
There is nothing wrong with a 12-team playoff for 2026—or beyond that, frankly. The first edition was a lot of fun, and the one obvious flaw has been corrected with seeding corresponding directly to the CFP selection committee rankings. No more wonky situations where lower-ranked teams earn first-round byes, penalizing the best teams.
Let’s see the format play out again this season and in 2026. Don’t rush yet another change in a sport that has rarely let its fans settle into one format for very long.
If 16 feels inevitable—and it probably is—then at least make it 16 teams that earn their place regardless of conference affiliation. It’s probable that the Big Ten and SEC would get at least four bids almost every year, and often more than that. But let that play out on the field.
For now, at least, the Big Ten’s attempted power play has suffered a power outage. It has been replaced by a new esprit de corps with the leagues it tried to stuff in a garbage can. Tone Deaf Tony is finally getting the message.
