SEC, Big Ten Commissioners Discuss Future of CFB, Playoff in 'Unprecedented' Meeting

SEC and Big Ten leaders held an "unprecedented" meeting on Thursday, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told reporters.

The meeting involved Sankey, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and member schools' athletic directors, Ross Dellenger reported for Yahoo Sports.

Sankey and Petitti used the meeting to "strongly" push back against a recent proposal from private equity firms for involvement in future revenue sharing with student-athletes, per Heather Dinich of ESPN.

The conference leaders also discussed what the College Football Playoff would look like in the future, per Dellenger.

Topics of discussion also included scheduling arrangements between basketball and football programs during the regular season, Dellenger reported.

Dellenger noted that "no decisions were made" during the meeting.

But Dinich described the meeting as establishing an "important united front" between two conferences that would likely need to support fundamental changes, such as the recent private equity proposal reported by Dellenger, before they are approved by the NCAA.

Dellenger reported on Tuesday that a group of investors under the name Smash Capital had proposed a concept titled "Project Rudy," which would establish essentially a college football super league by combining the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC into a single group.

The project would expand the postseason, remove games against Group of Five and FCS schools, place all member schools under a single media rights agreement, and introduce revenue distribution tiered by success with the possibility of relegation for bottom teams, according to Dellenger.

The proposal involves as much as "$9 billion of private capital" going into the NCAA, Dellenger wrote.

"I have yet to see a single thing in any plan that I've learned details about that contains things that we couldn't do ourselves and our A4 colleagues as well," Petitti told reporters about the Smash Capital proposal, per Dinich. "At the end of the day, there's a strong commitment that you have the ability to do all of this ourselves."

Sankey also expressed criticism of the Project Rudy report, and another proposal for a superleague made by a group known as College Sports Tomorrow, coming ahead of the conferences' meeting.

"I don't think it's coincidence that they ramped up their public relations scheme around our meeting," Sankey said, per Dellenger.

Sankey told reporters that the Big Ten and SEC do not plan to keep their deliberations to themselves, and that he and Petitti "talk regularly" with Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, per Dinich.

But Dellenger's estimation is that this meeting is the start of the SEC and Big Ten, who boast a combined 34 members and the highest revenues in college athletics, is the beginning of Sankey and Petitti pushing for changes that benefit their members.

According to Dellenger, those are likely to include more guaranteed spots in the CFP for Big Ten and SEC teams, "which permits them to play tougher regular season schedules (presumably against one another) and paves the way for, perhaps, a conference play-in tournament into the CFP at the end of the regular season."

Both Petitti and Sankey were open about the schools discussing ways to get more in-conference games on the schedule during the meeting, per Dinich.

"The question is there a structure where the two league offices work together to create more of those matchups?" Petitti said, per Dinich. "We had a pretty big discussion about the path to play each other more — see if you can figure out how you can actually do it; decide what games you want, how many — but that's a broad discussion."

The Big Ten and SEC commissioners said they will watch the inaugural 12-team playoff this season before deciding what shape they want to encourage the tournament to take in the future, per Dinich.

Earlier this week a federal judge gave preliminary approval to a pending settlement between the NCAA and Power Five, which once approved will set the stage for DI schools to directly pay athletes for the first time.

As the NCAA works to decide what this new form of college athletics will look like, there is likely to be more jockeying for influence among the conferences, outside investors and member schools. An alliance between the Big Ten and SEC will make sure these conferences remain an influential voice in the process.