Pete Thamel previews how Big Ten, SEC partnership would cut off other conferences

Pete Thamel certainly can’t predict the future, but if the recent collaboration between the Big Ten and SEC conferences continues to evolve, the ESPN insider is foreshadowing a college football landscape most fans won’t recognize.

Amid all the speculation surrounding the Big Ten and SEC’s recent partnership regarding any future changes to the current College Fotball Playoff format, including the controversial proposal to give both leagues four automatic qualifiers while the ACC and Big 12 receive two apiece, Thamel believes any further movement to unite college football’s two most profitable conferences could forever change the sport in unforeseen ways.

During a recent discussion on ESPN’s College GameDay Podcast with host Rece Davis, Thamel cautioned about the potential dominoes that could fall if the SEC finally bites the bullet and adopts a nine-game conference schedule similar to the Big Ten format. According to Thamel, that would then lead the SEC and Big Ten to follow through on a long-rumored scheduling agreement that would link the two Power 4 conferences together for years to come.

“If the SEC goes to 9 (conference games), there’s a chance they engage in a scheduling arrangement with the Big Ten,” Thamel predicted. “So, if they do that, all of a sudden you have 10 games on the books, (and the) rivalry folks – the Kentucky–Louisville, Georgia–Georgia Tech, South Carolina–Clemson – would then have 11 Power games on the books. … It would be almost hard for the SEC to not (push to) go to an AQ (automatic qualifier Playoff) system at that point.”

Pete Thamel: Further Big Ten-SEC collaboration ‘would change the way college sports look radically’

In Thamel’s assessment, a joint scheduling agreeement between the Big Ten and SEC would only further widen the divide with the ACC and Big 12 conferences, and not just financially.

“Everything’s intertwined here in a very real way. But if those things happen, and it’s a huge if with a lot of complicated and expensive variables, it would really change the way the sport looks,” Thamel continued. “Because we just wouldn’t have – other than the ones that are scheduled already – the crossover of the ACC playing the SEC in a significant way. … It would really, I think, accentuate the difference between the two and everybody else. Now look, those differences are already there, and they’ll only become more apparent as the money separates everybody. The money is very different, the money in the Playoff distribution is now radically different.”

And while there weren’t any groundbreaking announcements to come out of this week’s College Football Playoff Management Committee meetings in Dallas, the SEC and Big Ten still hold enough cards as the two most profitable leagues that they could force more expansive changes to the Playoff that would only further deepen the clear schism developing among the haves and have-nots in college football.

“I just think it would change the way college sports look radically,” Thamel added. “And that’s not an opinion one way or another, if it’s good or it’s bad, but when you really game out how it would look, we would really only get a data set of the Big Ten and SEC versus each other, and it’d be hard to judge and grade what the ACC and the Big 12 would look like because they would certainly have to play each other more, the schedules would all change, non-conference games would get whacked left and right, and we’d be left with a lot of guessing is what it would come down to.”