Canzano: Who will stand up to the Big Ten and SEC?
The greater good should always matter.
It wasn’t that long ago that Mike Aresco hoped the Big 12 and ACC would stand alongside the Group of Five schools in an attempt to keep the Big Ten and SEC from running away with it all.
Aresco was working as the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference. The negotiations to expand the College Football Playoff to 12 teams were ongoing. The SEC and Big Ten had long held themselves above the rest of college football, dominating the national title games and raking in hundreds of millions more from their media rights contracts. Those two conferences operated with an elitist mentality for decades, but something about the negotiations for the new CFP felt different.
“It’s become Darwinian,” Aresco said last spring. “They really threw their weight around in this whole CFP process.”
Aresco declined to comment for this piece. He’s maintained a low profile since retiring last spring. But his words in that exit interview rang in my ears this week as the SEC and Big Ten were back at it, bulldozing ahead and trying to seize four automatic bids each in a 16-team field.