Even SEC fans can admit it: The Big Ten just earned its most impressive feat ever
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As the confetti fell on Indiana after Monday night’s historic national championship win, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti joined the championship stage as a quiet bystander. You can assume that Petitti and plenty of Big Ten fans had a similar thought after its 3rd different national champion in as many years.
“How do you like that, SEC?”
It’s not in Petitti’s nature to make brash statements in the way that one Greg Sankey, who was also in attendance at Hard Rock Stadium, has been known to do. It was Sankey who somewhat infamously said at the SEC Championship 2 years ago that “one of these things is not like the other” when discussing Alabama‘s Playoff credentials for the last year of the 4-team field in 2023. At that point, Ohio State was the only Big Ten team who had won a national title in the 21st century. On top of that, it had been 9 years since the Big Ten had claimed a national title.
Roughly 25.5 months later, one of these things is not like the other. It’s just not what Sankey had in mind.
Three consecutive national championships by 3 different schools was a feat that only the SEC could flex about in the post-integration era of college football. We saw that play out twice during the SEC’s run of dominance from 2006-22. It happened in 2007-10 with LSU, Florida, Alabama and Auburn getting it done, then it happened again from 2019-21 with LSU, Alabama and Georgia doing so.
It was the type of flex that quieted the lazy narrative that the SEC was just Alabama and everyone else. While there’s something to be said for Nick Saban being the rising Tide who lifted all the SEC boats during that run, the results were there.
Now, it’s the Big Ten who gets to celebrate its most impressive feat ever.
Think about it. Big Ten fans have long been bothered by SEC bias, but how was the college football world supposed to treat a conference in Dec. 2023 when these were the only national titles it had claimed since 1975:
- 1997 Michigan (with Big 12 Nebraska)
- 2002 Ohio State
- 2014 Ohio State
Three national titles in 4 decades, and really, it was more like 2.5 with Michigan’s shared national title. At the time when Sankey banged the drum for the SEC in Dec. 2023 — he really was focusing strictly on the Alabama schedule compared to Florida State and not on the Big Ten — the Big Ten’s last non-Ohio State team to win an outright national title was 1952 Michigan State. And sure, while there were other shared non-Ohio State Big Ten national champs like 1958 Iowa, 1960 Minnesota and 1965-66 Michigan State, even plenty of Boomers weren’t old enough to remember to remember those teams.
This is the golden age of Big Ten football. Indiana confirmed that.
In an odd way, Indiana’s 16-0 season is the ultimate Big Ten flex. It’s perhaps a microcosm of the conference as a whole, albeit in an extreme way. Lord knows the smattering of pre-Curt Cignetti era crowds at Indiana games wasn’t the same experience throughout the Big Ten. But this rise in a new era of college football has indeed been meteoric. If it had just been Michigan and Ohio State winning national titles, that probably wouldn’t have changed too many opinions about the balance of power within the conference. Even plenty of Boomers only remember that type of Big Ten hierarchy.
And while an Oregon national title would’ve still yielded the 3 unique champions in as many years, perhaps it would’ve felt a bit “bought” because of the established Ducks joining the Big Ten in 2024.
But Indiana? Despite what naysayers will tell you, that wasn’t a bought championship. It wasn’t bought for IU, and it wasn’t bought for the Big Ten. That was a mix of finding the perfect coach, who not only made elite personnel decisions across the board, but he also recognized the new era of the sport.
Even Saban joked about why the Big Ten has a new advantage:
You couldn’t make that case in 2023 when Michigan won it all with a unique combination of soon-to-be-punished coaches and a roster that felt like the last non-portal reliant group of its kind. You could make a stronger case of that in 2024 when Ohio State won it all, especially after SEC transfers like Caleb Downs and Quinshon Judkins played a big part in that run, but again, the Buckeyes always had title-contending rosters.
Indiana? Like, the school with the largest living alumni base that just turned Miami’s own stadium into a pro-Hoosier crowd in a national championship after a lifetime of irrelevance? That’s new.
What IU lacked in blue-chip recruits, it made up for with how instantly well-paid that coaching staff was, though as Cignetti said with a deadpan after Monday night’s national championship that “our NIL is nowhere near where people think it is. So you can throw that out.”
Uh, that’s changing soon.
This whole sport is continuing to change. Perhaps it’ll change in the form of Petitti forcing Sankey to agree to the 24-team Playoff that his Big Ten administrators are pushing for behind the scenes. At this point, who knows? Certainly nobody could’ve predicted 25.5 months ago that the Big Ten would crown a trio of national champions, and that all of them would come from universities who had spent more than a century in the conference.
Call it a Big Ten golden age. Perhaps this 3-year run will end and the power will shift elsewhere by the end of the 2020s decade, wherein another round of realignment could be in store with those ACC exit fees set to drop to $75 million in 2030-31. Or perhaps the angst that Big Ten fans felt as the SEC stacked national titles during the first 2 decades of the 21st century has shifted South.
Either way, it’s clear. There’s no time like the present for the Big Ten, and IU just gifted the conference its most impressive feat ever.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
