I don’t have the time or bandwidth to deal with the internal machinations of the Big Ten’s financial fleecing of itself. So let’s begin with the obvious.
Is Tony Petitti trying to kill the Big Ten all by himself?
Just when you think it couldn’t get worse than the last dolt of a conference commissioner asking players to run two seasons in nine months during a global pandemic, who ruined the Big Ten’s reputation with something called the Alliance before bolting for the NFL, Petitti has decided to hang his tenure as Big Ten commissioner on allowing the Wolf through the door.
The Wolf of private equity.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you financial stupidity: the Big Ten, the richest and most financially secure conference of all — by a wide margin — desperately trying to jump in bed with private equity in exchange for a piece of each school’s valuable, and ever-increasing, media rights.
And by jump in bed, I mean sell its soul.
Because once those private equity sharks, whose entire reason for being is — how can I say this? — making money above all else, are allowed one foot in the door, the Big Ten will cease to exist as we know it. One foot becomes one more favor, and then another, and the next thing you know, the sharks are swimming in what was once an oasis.
And for what? To win games?
Look, if the 16 Big Ten athletic departments who receive full shares of media rights money can’t exist on a projected $75 million in fiscal 2025 (increasing every year of the deal that ends in 2030), there are more than 100 FBS schools who are dying to try — including Oregon and Washington, the most recent Big Ten additions who are being phased in financially over the course of the media rights deal.
I mean, what in the Ten Year War is going on?
Here’s the problem with Petitti’s end around: He’s trying to pull it off in the middle of the most drastic change in the history of college sports, using both the distraction of the ever-evolving framework and the desperation of member institutions who don’t yet know how to get their arms around the unwieldy beast.
It’s quite the manipulation when you think about it.
These universities who had to deal with former commissioner Kevin Warren convincing their presidents the SEC was the boogeyman and was coming for their cash — and that’s why they had to destroy the Pac-12, and the perfectly imperfect college football framework, by proxy — now have a commissioner who continues to make baffling moves that aren’t in the best interest of the legendary conference.
You want more money? Expand the playoff to 16 teams — like the SEC and every other FBS conference wants — and get more media rights money from your television partners.
You want more money? I’m staring at millions given to Oregon and Washington, who were added to the league because some dolt decided to grab USC and UCLA without thinking it through — and then realized the two schools that were, in many cases, three time zones from the conference footprint needed travel partners.
In my best Deshaun Foster, “We’re in, uh, L.A.”
Los Angeles.
The best part of Petitti’s shell game is it took USC and Michigan — apparently the only rationally thinking members of the stoic and stodgy conference — to grind the gears and slow the roll of running the conference off a financial cliff.
The Big Ten is calling this proposed $2.4 billion deal with the devil a “plan” — because plan sounds like something that was analyzed and scrutinized and is an agreeable structure. Not a deal, which sounds more like somebody is winning and somebody is getting the short end of it.
Let me explain, as easily as possibly — again, without getting into the weeds of it all — who’s winning and who’s losing: if you’re trying to pass this deal without each university’s board of trustees digesting the specifics, you might be on the short end of it.
The fact universities at some schools are using presidents and/or athletic directors to sign off on this deal is remarkably reckless. University presidents are hired to raise money, athletic directors are hired to spend it.
My god, this can’t be real.
The Big Ten reported $928 million in revenue last year, and in fiscal 2025, USA TODAY Sports projects the revenue to jump to $1.2-1.4 billion. Billion, with a B.
There isn’t a revenue problem in the Big Ten, there’s a budget problem.
And then there’s Petitti, opening his arms to private equity sharks whose sole purpose in life is making deals in which they benefit. They’re not just giving you $2.4 billion out of the goodness of their heart.
And they sure as hell aren’t doing it without influence, unintended or otherwise. They’re doing it because they’ve got a big fish on the line, one who’s hungry and needs to feed.
No matter how many souls it takes down with it.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.