Last week, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that Big 12 Board Chair Linda Livingstone has sent out a letter calling for an “urgent” meeting to discuss models for the “future of college football.”
Livingstone, the president at Baylor University, officially called for a “Presidents and Chancellors Summit” on December 2-3 — just days after the conclusion of the regular season — in the Dallas area.
Now, just over a week later, CBS Sports is confirming that presidents and chancellors from the Big 12 and the ACC will attend the meeting, during which they will view two formal presentations on potential future college football postseasons — “Project Rudy” and the “College Student Football League.”
Interestingly, CBS Sports also corroborates Thamel’s report that officials from the Big Ten and SEC are not expected to be present at the meeting, despite receiving the same request.
“It’s disappointing they’re poo-pooing it,” North Carolina AD Bubba Cunningham said of the Big Ten and SEC. “Even if you attend the meeting and participated and decided it wasn’t for you, that would be at least to me a better thing to do. But just to dismiss it out of hand is frustrating.”
“I have yet to see a single thing in any plan that contains things that we couldn’t do ourselves and do with our [Power Four] colleagues,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said last month.
So, how seriously should take these meetings if the SEC and Big Ten aren’t a part of them?
Well, that’s hard to say at this time, but it does feel as if both Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti see some sort of change coming on the horizon, based on their comments surrounding the Super League idea.
“I’ve studied it a little bit and I come back to, I don’t want to dumb down the Southeastern Conference to be a part of some ‘super league’ notion with 70 teams that some people speculate would happen,” Sankey said last month. “They want to be us, and that’s on them to figure it out, not on me to bring myself back to Earth.”
