The Big Ten kicked off its three-day football media event Tuesday at the Chicago Hilton with a news conference from commissioner Tony Petitti.
One-third of the Big Ten’s 18 coaches, including Illinois’ Bret Bielema, also held news conferences, and players from their schools met with reporters. The remaining coaches and players will speak Wednesday and Thursday.
As the Big Ten gets ready to open another highly anticipated season, here are four things we heard.
1. Illinois coach Bret Bielema says the SEC wants to ‘live in 2005 forever.’
While leading off the coaches’ news conferences Tuesday morning, Bielema wasted no time adding to the debate about whether the SEC or the Big Ten is better when it comes to college football.
The debate has gained steam considering the Big Ten won the last three national championships. But former Alabama coach Nick Saban made headlines recently when he suggested the SEC’s depth is still better.
“I know (commissioner Greg Sankey has) got to protect the SEC, and they kind of want to live in 2005 forever, but I think the forward thinking of where we are in college football is an awesome thing,” Bielema said.
When Bielema was asked later to expand on his comments, he cracked: “Well, I think I just made the headline, right?”
Bielema, who previously coached in the SEC at Arkansas, said he meant that college football is in a different era given NIL and the transfer portal, noting that he wouldn’t be able to have the roster he does — including East Carolina transfer quarterback Katin Houser — before both. That, he believes, has changed the playing field from the days when the SEC dominated.
“It’s a different world,” Bielema said. “The quarterback I have now, we would not have gotten if this world existed five years ago. I know that. Neither would my left tackle, my left guard, my center and my right tackle be here playing for me. You go around to every team, and the rosters have changed because of those two components: the transfer rule and revenue share. It’s a different world. Anything beyond that is nonsense.”
Petitti said he wasn’t going to get into which conference was better, but he noted that he believes the Big Ten’s recent College Football Playoff success was helped by the difficulty of conference play.
“This 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. How we play, the difficulty on the road in the Big Ten, I just think that’s overlooked.”
2. Petitti said the Big Ten will exhaust other options before seriously considering breaking off from the NCAA. But the conference does have people talking about it.
Sankey made headlines last week when he talked about the “real” conversations being held in the SEC about whether the conference would break away from the NCAA if it can’t solve some of the issues in college sports that have come with revenue sharing, NIL and the transfer portal.
When asked about those comments, Petitti said the Big Ten is first focused on the Protect College Sports Act, federal college sports legislation that multiple parties currently are refining.
Petitti said there were hundreds of calls over the previous 10 days with conference leaders and the bill’s sponsors as conferences gave their feedback on some of the language in the bill, which is more in-depth than the Big Ten preferred. As of Tuesday morning, he expected to view an amended version of the bill “shortly.”
Petitti said teams of people in the Big Ten are already working on what to do should the bill not pass.
He believes the next step would be to get with the other conferences to try to come to an agreement “to make the necessary changes to the way the (House settlement) is operating so we can give our athletic directors, our coaches, our student-athletes a system that seems to be more sustainable and more predictable.”
If that doesn’t work, Petitti said the Big Ten then needs to ask whether there is a way to have conference-based rules.
“That’s not necessarily breaking away,” Petitti said. “It doesn’t mean you’re not going to play anybody else. But is there a path to have rules that we can at least operate from the conference?”
The bill is still the focus as of now, and among its more interesting points, according to reporting by YahooSports, is the creation of a $25 million retention pool to keep current players on teams’ rosters. That would be on top of revenue sharing, which was $20.5 million in 2025-26. Of that $25 million pool, $5 million would have to be reserved for women’s NIL.
Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman called it “a really savvy way to approach continuing to put more money into the system.”
“It would have a lot of benefits to all of college athletics,” Whitman said in a small session with reporters. “I like the idea it could potentially give schools additional ammunition in retaining talent and would hopefully tamp down some of the transfer activity as well.”
3. Petitti said the Big Ten championship game would be eliminated with a 24-team College Football Playoff.
Petitti and the Big Ten continue to put their support behind expanding the current 12-team CFP to 24 teams. He said the conference has made adjustments to its proposal, including no longer focusing on automatic qualifiers and allowing a selection committee to pick the qualifiers.
He said he believes there has “been a lot of movement among coaches and ADs around the country that 24 is the right number.” Petitti argued that a 24-team playoff would create more meaningful college football games, including in the regular season as teams compete for playoff byes and home games.
One casualty of such an expansion would be the Big Ten championship game, which Petitti said the conference is willing to give up for a 24-team playoff. He believes fans will be happy with the expansion.
“I’m confident we’ll fill our stadiums, and we will have really large audiences watching these games if we expand,” he said.
4. Whitman said the next step for Illinois football is ‘sustained success.’
Illinois football won a program-record 19 games over the last two seasons, including winning bowl games against South Carolina and Tennessee.
This year’s Illini team has a lot of question marks with new quarterback Houser and new defensive coordinator Bobby Hauck and staff, not to mention a retooled offensive line. But the Illini are still focused on taking the next step in Bielema’s sixth season.
For Whitman, that starts with consistency in winning.
“Can we continue to build this floor that really becomes the expectation for our program?” Whitman said. “As (Bielema) mentioned from the podium, we’ve been one, maybe two wins away the last couple of years from being in serious CFP contention. That is a goal for us. We’ve got to get into that conversation. We continue to look for places we can move the needle a bit higher.”
When Bielema looked at the big picture, he said he wants his team to get better on the road. The Illini lost at Indiana, Washington and Wisconsin last season and finished a highly anticipated season short of expectations at 9-4.
“To build a successful campaign to get 10 wins or more in the regular season, which will get you in the playoffs, I think we’re going to have to win on the road, so that’s a big one,” Bielema said. “Contend is a great word, right, but I think championships are what people remember. And to get in those conversations, to do it more consistently, you’ve got to have a lot of great things going for you.
“We’ve got pieces of those puzzles, but we’ve had a game or two each year that’s kind of knocked us out of the playoffs. And to get over the hump, most of those have been on the road.”
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