Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti Opens Up on Additions of Oregon and Washington

At Big Ten Media Days in July, commissioner Tony Petitti said the conference's administrators told him to focus scheduling its new Los Angeles additions, USC and UCLA, before considering further expansion. Since then, the Big Ten has added two more teams from the crumbling Pac-12.

On Aug. 11, the Big Ten added Oregon and Washington. In a recent sit-down with The Athletic, Petitti said the league had to consider those additions once Colorado left the Pac-12 to return to the Big 12.

“The Colorado move to the Big 12 increased some inbound conversations,” Petitti told The Athletic. “We then spent time talking about that with the group of our presidents, then involved the full group of presidents and the athletic directors just to sort of pursue what a structure would look like and whether it was real interest from Oregon and Washington. Those conversations all took place early during the week. What obviously changed was just the circumstances around it. It created a different timeframe.”

The issue for the Big Ten when it added USC and UCLA was scheduling every sport except for football, and the league's new Flex Protect Plus model for football. The Flex model allows football teams to play their most hated rivals every year while making sure they play every other team in the conference in a two-year span.

Now, the 18-team conference has to incorporate Oregon and Washington to the Flex model. Regardless of what happens, though, Petitti says the Big Ten will not return to a divisional format.

"If you’re playing nine conference games and you’re breaking into divisions, you’re playing so much against your own division that you’re not really crossing over," Petitti said. "The inability to see other teams and really connect the conference is not ideal. So, there’s a competitive aspect to it, but there’s also a practicality.

“We want our members to see each other as frequently as we can make it happen. The system that we have does that. Divisions would make that way more complicated.”

Petitti also said the addition of Oregon and Washington helped ease travel concerns for Olympic sports, decreasing travel for the West Coast schools. He told The Athletic that the Big Ten could consider the same neutral-site events that the ACC hinted at on Friday.