Big Ten members generally share common principles and philosophies, but rarely do their football programs link arms and back up one another the way other conferences do. There’s no “B-1-G” chant to match the “S-E-C!” that echoes in the stands after a victory against another conference.

The collective-good sentiment comes in the offseason. The play on the field stands on its own.

Fans waved “Ohio Against The World” flags at Ohio State’s first two College Football Playoff games, and the Buckeyes took that mindset into games against SEC foe Tennessee and Big Ten champion Oregon. After beating Tennessee in chilly Columbus, Ohio State’s players were concerned only about their well-being, not what the win meant to the conference they represent.

“I understand people have pride in their conference and pride in their schools,” guard Donovan Jackson said after a 42-17 first-round victory against Tennessee. “But I have pride in mine, and I just want to win as many games as possible with the group we’ve got and just keep going from there.”

Similarly, Penn State coach James Franklin said this to reporters a day before his team topped Boise State 31-14 in a CFP quarterfinal: “Obviously, we want to represent the Big Ten, and that’s important to us. But, ultimately, I’m worried about Penn State. I’ve got respect for coaching in the SEC because I’ve been there. (I) take a lot of pride in representing the Big Ten. But ultimately, I’m worried about these guys, the guys in that locker room.”

If ever there was a time for the Big Ten to boast about itself, it’s now. Legacy brands Ohio State and Penn State make up half of this week’s CFP semifinals, where they will play Texas and Notre Dame, respectively. The league has won nine postseason games and is 4-1 in head-to-head matchups with the SEC, including a depleted Michigan squad’s upset of Alabama, the highest-ranked team left out of the CFP, in the ReliaQuest Bowl. The on-field results go hand-in-hand with Big Ten success off the field, two years into a landmark media rights contract and one year into West Coast expansion that has enhanced the league’s visibility.

Yet the Big Ten office has remained quiet this month. Second-year commissioner Tony Petitti, a longtime TV executive who was instrumental in setting up the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, routinely takes cell phone photos of marching bands in pregame and postgame celebrations but only for his own posterity. He doesn’t post on social media, and he prefers the on-field action to speak for itself. That was true before the 2024 kickoff featuring North Carolina at Minnesota in August and didn’t change an hour before the Oregon-Ohio State Rose Bowl.

When asked whether Petitti would like to discuss his teams’ football success knowing the Rose Bowl champion would join Penn State in a 50 percent Big Ten semifinal round, a league official said it’s not Petitti’s style to brag but he might consider talking later in the Playoff if the rest of the games play out in the league’s favor.

That’s a very real possibility. Should Ohio State and Penn State win this week, it would mark the second consecutive year that two current Big Ten teams will face off for the national championship. Last year, Michigan won the CFP title by ousting Washington, which left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in August. The Wolverines beat Alabama, and the Huskies topped Texas (just before the Longhorns formally joined the SEC) in the semifinals.

“This would really completely change the paradigm of college football that has been all about the SEC, particularly when (Nick) Saban was at Alabama and then Kirby Smart going for a three-peat last year,” SEC Network host Paul Finebaum said on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” last Friday. “Imagine if it’s two Big Ten teams and the Big Ten is ruling the world. I’m not sure what we’re going to do down here in SEC country but hang our head.”

The good news for the Big Ten is this might be just the start of a successful run. Northern teams long were at a postseason disadvantage because they took inclement weather into account when developing their style of play, then played almost all of their biggest bowl and Playoff games in pristine track-meet conditions. With at least one round of on-campus CFP games, colder temperatures now will become a factor in the national title chase in a way they haven’t before, which may lead everyone outside of the Midwest to do some adjusting of their own.

“I was the first one talking about, when are we ever going to get these SEC schools up to the Midwest in like December?” ESPN college football analyst and former Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard told The Athletic. “I want to see Alabama play up in the (Horseshoe). I want to see Georgia play up in Happy Valley. I want to see LSU play in the Big House in December.

“Weather can be the great equalizer, and I just don’t think those schools in the SEC are built for that.”

The Big Ten enjoys the most lucrative media rights deal in college sports history, pulling in around $1 billion annually through the 2029-30 sports season. The income generated from those contracts with Fox, CBS and NBC provides 16 of the 18 schools (Oregon and Washington have half shares through 2029) with about $75.2 million from the conference office during the current fiscal year. That’s a $14 million jump from fiscal year 2024. That revenue increase will help the league’s 18 schools pay their athletes directly, once the House v. NCAA settlement becomes permanent in April. The projected revenue sharing cap for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins July 1, is around $20.5 million per school. Most Big Ten schools plan to meet or approach that cap, but banter among the lower-income departments has officials hedging most of their answers with “hope to” or “we have to find a way” by mixing external fund raising with internal cost control.

The current NIL model has helped Big Ten schools compete above board for portal targets and, perhaps just as important, retain athletes with eligibility who had NFL options. That was critical for Ohio State, which had a robust collective that spent $20 million to keep an elite defense intact and brought in key pieces like quarterback Will Howard, safety Caleb Downs, running back Quinshon Judkins and center Seth McLaughlin through the portal.

The internal funding mechanism will enable the Big Ten to compete more vigorously for out-of-market athletes, who traditionally have stayed near their homes in football-rich states of Texas and Florida. Recent expansion to California, Oregon and Washington has provided Big Ten programs in the Eastern and Central time zones with fertile recruiting areas.

“There’s a ton of talent out there,” Iowa general manager Tyler Barnes said. “Now, with the Pac-12 being the Pac-2 … kids out there are a little bit more open to travel versus kids in the Northeast.”

West Coast expansion has added large markets for Big Ten Network, of which the league owns 39 percent (Fox owns 61 percent). The combination of brand power and competitive excellence among the four new additions has reinforced the Big Ten’s strengths in many sports other than football. But between Washington’s CFP appearance last January, Oregon’s No. 1 ranking for most of the 2024 season and USC’s rich tradition, the newcomers have contributed to a melting pot of style and substance on the football field.

“The thing you’d say about this conference is that it does have a great variety of what success looks like,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said before the Rose Bowl. “You can win in a lot of different ways in this conference. There’s some teams that are ground-and-pound teams in this conference. There’s teams that throw the ball. There’s a lot of different defensive schemes.

“So, I think the variety more than anything sticks out that you have to be able to prepare for different situations, different moments throughout the season when you play the teams in this conference.”

But Indiana’s CFP inclusion whipped the Big Ten’s detractors into a frenzy, as skeptics within and outside the SEC looked to discount the Hoosiers’ 11-win season because of their strength of schedule. While calling Indiana’s first-round loss to Notre Dame, ESPN broadcaster Sean McDonough said, “I don’t understand why there’s this presumption from many that the Big Ten is so much better than the ACC or the Big 12. I’m not sure what that’s based on.

“I think they need to lose the assumption that the SEC and the Big Ten are clearly head and shoulders above everybody else, particularly the Big Ten.”

ESPN broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit added to the conversation the next morning by saying Indiana “was not a team that should have been on that field when you consider other teams that could have been there,” alluding to Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina, the 9-3 SEC teams who landed on the wrong side of the bubble. A day later, Ohio State’s throttling of Tennessee froze out the conference-level implications of those takes. Within a fortnight, Michigan and Illinois beat Alabama and South Carolina in bowl games.

“It goes a long way, in my opinion, in debunking a lot of this noise that these SEC schools deserve to be in the CFP, because of whatever rationale these people try to come up with,” said Howard, who played at Michigan. “But it always boils down to because they’re in the SEC.

“No one’s talking about the way that Ohio State beat the brakes off of Tennessee, like they’re not even mentioning that. They would rather talk about Indiana or talk about SMU, but that game happened, too. You can’t ignore it. So, it’s always funny to me, the way people pick and choose what they want to criticize depending on what narrative they’re trying to push.”

Unlike other conference commissioners, Petitti chose not to weigh in publicly on his teams’ Playoff positioning before the final selection and did not speak up during the Indiana debate. Petitti’s understated personality came to the forefront in a Nashville hotel ballroom in October when he and SEC counterpart Greg Sankey sat side by side following a joint meeting between the league’s athletics directors.

The leaders are as different as the regions and conferences they represent. Over 45 minutes, Sankey responded to most of the questions, while Petitti sat by and answered more matter-of-factly. The commissioners manage college athletics’ two most powerful brands and are the driving force in future CFP negotiations, which could include more Playoff teams and a restructured format. A surging Big Ten gives the league more clout based on performance, which will legitimize changes that might benefit it and the SEC. It also intensifies the competition between those two leagues, which brings more attention and eyeballs.

“We’ve done well to work together,” Sankey said in October. “We still want to beat each other. I wanted to win the game in Vegas (USC over LSU in Week 1), and he was there, and he was happy. We won the game in Ann Arbor (Texas over Michigan in Week 2), and we won the game in Madison (Alabama over Wisconsin in Week 3). So, I mean, good for me. Now, he’s gonna try to get retribution.”

If Ohio State can beat Texas this week, it’s safe to say Petitti has gotten more than his share of retaliation for those regular-season losses to the SEC. Should the Big Ten win a second straight national title, it would set the tone for the offseason and flip the narrative that its reputation exceeds its football substance. The Big Ten-SEC rivalry is about to intensify as the external factors dictating both conferences’ strategies change, and the Big Ten perhaps is in a better position to succeed than at any time in the last 50 years.

(Photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)