With Jim Harbaugh long gone to the NFL, the Big Ten Media Days don’t have quite the same edge. When the three-day event kicked off at the Hilton Chicago on Tuesday, there was a lot of inside-football talk about 3-3-5 defenses and plenty of coach-speak about leadership and cohesion.
But there also was substantive discussion of some of the storm clouds hovering over college sports in general and football in particular. And as usual, there were a few zingers from Illinois coach Bret Bielema.
He didn’t wait long to take a shot at the SEC, which has been going back-and-forth with the Big Ten about which is the best football conference.
“They want to live in 2005 forever,” Bielema said.
He’s qualified to talk about the two leagues, having been a coach in both with stints at Wisconsin and Illinois wrapped around a forgettable stint at Arkansas.
A follow-up question on his SEC hot take led to Bielema weighing in on the Big Ten’s much-maligned and long-gone division names: Leaders and Legends.
“I don’t know how the hell we got there,” Bielema said, echoing the feelings of most fans and the rest of the college football world.
Wondering how he got to talking about the names of almost forgotten divisions? It was part of a story about the need to turn the page, which he clearly believes the SEC should do.
Bielema recalled his unhappiness about Wisconsin not getting the same respect as some traditional powers when the divisions were created. He vented to longtime Wisconsin coach-turned-athletic director Barry Alvarez, who told him: “Don’t worry about things you can’t control. You can’t change people’s 50 years of history in the way they think.”
It was another way of saying that was then and this is now. The Big Ten has produced the last three national champions — won by three different schools — meaning the SEC has to come up with another argument for its supposed superiority.
That argument, which former Alabama coach Nick Saban and others have been peddling lately, boils down to the SEC being a deeper conference.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti pushed back hard against that narrative.
“The idea that the middle of our conference isn’t hard is just not right,” Petitti said. “At the end of the day, our teams are ready for the CFP. Our travel looks like the CFP travel. You’re going all over the country. The difficulty [of winning] on the road in the Big Ten — I just think that’s overlooked.”
Which conference plays better football is a fun argument. A more serious discussion is whether and how college sports can remain sustainable as more and more money pours into some programs and not to others.
“I don’t think you’ll talk to an AD or even a coach or anybody in the country that will tell you that exponential growth, every portal, is the right model,” Petitti said.
“We need to get to a place where we can have a model of growth that’s more realistic and looks more like what our revenue growth could possibly be.”
Part of the revenue piece is the eventual size of the playoff, which the Big Ten wants to see go from 12 teams to 24. More CFP games would mean more money. But some of that would just cancel out what the Big Ten would lose by killing its championship game — which almost certainly would happen with an expanded playoff, Pettiti said.
The spiraling costs of staying competitive in college sports and what role the federal government might have in regulating it are new — and urgent — topics.
But fans can be forgiven for wanting to return to the days when the biggest question was which conference was king.