‘On to the next one’ – the Big Ten is dominating the new era of college sports
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INDIANAPOLIS — As Tony Petitti wandered around the court, shaking hands and soaking in Michigan’s national championship, he didn’t realize he still had a piece of blue confetti in his hair. Surely, he didn’t mind it. If that’s the price to pay for another national title in a premier sport, the Big Ten commissioner would happily pay it.
The Big Ten Conference has now won the football (Indiana), men’s basketball (Michigan), and women’s basketball (UCLA) national titles in the same year. It’s the first time since women’s basketball became an NCAA sport that one conference has done that with three different schools claiming the championships.
“It says a lot about the coaches and the student-athletes we have — and the resources, and the fact that we have administrators and presidents that are really committed to doing this thing the right way,” Petitti said. “What I'm really proud of, night in and night out, is how well we competed — to get five of eight in the [men’s] Elite Eight, to have two of the [Final] Four, and then have this performance [from Michigan].
“It just shows you that they were battle-tested getting through the Big Ten this year, and that's true of almost everything we play. You know, we expect to win national championships.”
Petitti was announced as the league’s commissioner on April 11, 2023, almost exactly three years ago. Since that day, he’s watched three different Big Ten football programs win national championships. And now, he’s watched Michigan win the league’s first men’s basketball national title since 2000 and UCLA win the league’s first women’s basketball national title since 1999.
To underscore the heartbreak of the past two decades-plus, between 2000 and 2026, Big Ten men’s teams had gone 0-8 in national championship games.
No one can guarantee championships — especially not in the NCAA Tournament, which is notoriously difficult to win even for teams that dominated the regular season — but the league’s athletic directors have told Petitti for years that they expect the conference’s best teams to be in position to play for them. That's not just in the three largest revenue-producing sports, either. Two Big Ten teams (Michigan and Wisconsin) are about to play in the men's Frozen Four. There’s also the Penn State volleyball national championship back in 2024. The list goes on.
“When I first got to the league three years ago, they talked about how we want to compete in everything,” Petitti said. “Obviously, resources matter. You have to be honest about it. But you still need great coaching. You still need a commitment to winning and performing at a high level and coming together and building and developing players. I don't think that's ever going to change.
“The commitment to the coaching and getting the right people and the right student-athletes to believe in what their coaches are doing — I think you're seeing that across pretty much everything we play.”
It is impossible to ignore the fact that the Big Ten is dominating the national landscape in the NIL era. Much ink has been spilled about its schools having massive fan bases and very wealthy alumni, including billionaires. Now that NCAA rules permit paying athletes, Big Ten schools have had incredible levels of success. Michigan coach Dusty May joked last month that he’d have to go off the record to be free to fully explain what was going on prior to the legalization of NIL that determined who won titles. The insinuation was that it was the teams who paid players under the table.
But money doesn’t determine the actual winner of the NCAA Tournament. Otherwise, the nation’s most expensive roster would have been the one cutting down the nets. Michigan spent money, yes. But it wasn’t the biggest spender, and the players the Wolverines grabbed out of the portal were leaving their prior schools for a reason. UNC fans weren’t upset to see Elliot Cadeau gone, and UCLA didn’t seem to know how to use Aday Mara effectively, either. Yaxel Lendeborg was a big get, but he was also still coming from the mid-major level, at UAB.
Michigan’s all-transfer starting lineup is a testament to how you can win in college basketball in the modern era with players making an immediate impact in one season. But the UCLA women’s basketball team just won a title with six seniors, most of whom spent all or the majority of their careers with the Bruins. The Indiana football program won with a core group of players that were initially recruited to James Madison and a quarterback who came from a sub-.500 Cal team. Resources to retain and attract players are certainly part of the equation, but they don’t automatically mean you get the best players in the country. They also don’t automatically mean that you’ll win the most important games of your season.
“It's hard to win,” Petitti said. “There [are] a lot of great teams out there, and this tournament is a real gauntlet. … We've had a lot of great teams over the years, a lot of great coaches and players, and sometimes not everything goes your way. But I think this year, we felt good about how deep we were as a league in basketball, but also how elite we were.”
The league was deep, and that was reflected in the six Sweet 16 teams, five Elite Eight teams and half of the Final Four. But the one cutting down the nets reflected that the Big Ten’s best was also the nation’s best. That doesn’t always happen in the survive-and-advance NCAA Tournament, but it obviously did this year.
As for Petitti? He’ll enjoy the two trophies gained this week, but he’ll quickly turn his attention to the Frozen Four, where he’s got two teams competing to earn another.
“You're just on to the next one,” he said.
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