The SEC/Big Ten meeting was a joke

OK, so amid all the excitement about the Red River Shoot-Out, one bit of news should stick in the noggin, because to be quite frank, it’s far more important.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti met with each other as part of the joint advisory group they’d set up in February – careful to bring the lawyers with them just in case every other conference thought it might be collusion.

In part of his statement that you can only assume was – to use a British term – utter shite, Sankey said that he often talks to the ACC and Big 12 on the phone, but somehow can’t seem to get everyone together. “We talk regularly with our other two colleagues in the autonomy groups,” he said: “Do we bring everybody together? It was hard enough to schedule two conferences of athletics directors. I can’t imagine trying to schedule four.”

OK, let’s put this into the perspective of the Big 12 and ACC. With Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC, the Big 12 has had to poach the best of the AAC, pull an independent school and four schools from the Pac-12 to get the schedule up to standard. In the case of the ACC, you’re worrying about Florida State and Clemson wanting to leave, and so you poached one super-rich Texas school and a couple of schools that’s going to win a lot at Olympic sports.

And you’re telling me that Brett Yormark and Jim Phillips wouldn’t cut things out of the calendar to be at the table with you?

The meeting wasn’t ‘unprecedented’, so much as ‘manufactured’.

Sankey and Petitti are claiming to be thought-leaders on the way that college football is run, and with the monstrous TV deals with ESPN and FOX, that may very well be true. But this smacks of a move to get ‘more teams in’, by simply widening the play-off to a Sweet 16 (12 is still a bad idea, in our view), or simply creating a Super Conference where it will be them + basketball schools and Stanford and Cal to make them feel scholarly.

Don’t think for a second that this meeting is the latest move already down the slippery slope, where at the end of the Yellow Brick Road you see schools shuttering their football programs because the giant squids have taken all the talent and the crowds can’t come anymore.

This will not end well, and it’s going to be on Sankey and Petitti’s head.