Edit via Liam McGuire Matt Yoder Thu, October 22, 2026 at 3:30 PM UTC · 2 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The Big Ten and SEC run college football, but as the sport tries to chart its future, the two sides haven't found much they could agree upon. Until now?
After an exhausting period of negotiations, brinksmanship, and fan unrest, college football is moving towards a 24-team College Football Playoff. he Big Ten had been holding out against the SEC's wishes for the expanded playoff, but a compromise seems to finally have been reached with ESPN maintaining the exclusive rights . The opinions on the move wildly vary across the spectrum with some applauding the decision to expand postseason access while others believe it could be the death knell for the sport as we know it .
One of the worries about a 24-team playoff is that it will make the regular season obsolete with many of the top teams in the sport basically guaranteed passage to the engorged postseason. A very real risk exists that college football could go from having the most important, intense, and dramatic regular season to being one that is an afterthought.
And when it comes to non-conference scheduling, there would seem to be little incentive for top schools to schedule tough games that would wear their team out. But according to lead Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt, that could be rectified with a coming announcement about a scheduling agreement between the Big Ten and SEC.
"There are scheduling agreements that are in place once this thing expands officially," Klatt said on KTCK in Dallas according to Football Scoop . "The next thing that will happen almost immediately is we're going to get scheduling agreements between the SEC and the Big Ten — top-end matchups, mid-tier matchups, low-end matchups — and we're going to be expanding the valuable matchups in the non-conference, far surpassing what we have now."
That would certainly be good news for college football fans. The tribal warfare between the SEC and Big Ten is one of the biggest rivalries in sports. After a generation of dominance by the SEC, the Big Ten has turned the tables in recent years. And as much as fans and the media love to debate hypotheticals, a challenge series up and down the standings would finally provide some real games to discuss.
Most importantly for the powers that be in college football, it could also bring about new revenue opportunities, especially if the conferences look to eschew their current deals in a series of neutral site games that could command additional money. And when it comes to college football, usually what's best for everyone's bank accounts is what gets done.
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Source: Sports
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