Mandel's Mailbag: Is Greg Sankey really college football's villain? What about Tony Petitti?

After absorbing all the SNL 50th anniversary content last weekend, it occurred to me that the mailbag has a 25th coming up in 2027.

Better start planning the reunion special now.

We would invite some of our most frequent subjects from Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney, Kirby Smart ...

Charlie Weis and Brian Ferentz.

Perhaps Larry David and the cast of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Advertisement But given how much Ive written about two particular topics, the BCS/College Football Playoff and realignment, the entire front row of the audience might consist of current and former conference commissioners.

Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Is Greg Sankey the reason for all the angst we are currently experiencing? Or the whipping boy? David B.

While Ive given Sankey his share of ribbing, particularly about his push to expand the NCAA basketball tournament, I dont think he should be your designated scapegoat for the ills of college football.

Hes at least paid some mind to the greater good of the sport through the years, most notably the fact he was one of the four people who devised the original 12-team Playoff.

No one could say it was in the SECs best interest to give the Group of 5 an automatic berth or to make first-round byes exclusive to conference champs.

Id advise you instead to look north (and west).

The Big Ten has hired consecutive commissioners who care little about anything but their own conferences TV fortunes.

The short-lived Kevin Warren era effectively handed over control of his conference to Fox Sports, which sat in the room for its meetings with other networks in 2022, helped put the USC/UCLA move into motion and paid just enough for the league to absorb Oregon/Washington.

Warren went along with the ill-fated Alliance, which infuriated Sankey and may have ignited Sankeys heel turn into more of a power-driven commissioner.

But now comes Tony Petitti, who makes Warren seem noble and altruistic.

Petitti is a TV exec whose primary focus is creating more inventory.

He was the one first beating the drum behind the scenes for this 14-team/four-auto berth charade .

What he wants more than anything is to be able to stage his own play-in tournament (No.

3 vs.

No.

6, No.

4 vs.

No.

5) that he can sell to a network and make even more money.

Who cares if it destroys the credibility of the larger CFP enterprise? Advertisement Sankey has been an easy target through the years because so many fans resent the SECs on-field dominance.

He regularly puts himself in front of microphones and cameras, whereas Petitti has been doing less media than any power-conference commissioner I can remember.

Hes largely avoided scrutiny as a result.

I wonder if that will start changing here soon.

Most of the headlines about the potential move to a 14-team Playoff have been about the SEC and Big Ten exercising their control.

But the most impactful change is it would greatly reduce the impact of subjective rankings.

Would you rather see the Playoff determined by committee rankings or conference standings? Eric, Chicago Its a valid point, especially after last season, when the committee did not pretend to care about strength of schedule.

The problem is, these are not a bunch of 10-team leagues playing round-robin schedules.

Nor is it the NFL, where every division abides by the same scheduling model.

Were talking 16- and 18-team conferences that play wildly disparate schedules.

Case in point, last season in the Big Ten, Purdue played all five teams that finished in the AP Top 25, while Indiana played one.

Is that conferences standings any more scientific than the committees rankings? Furthermore, the committee would still be a thing, and its rankings would still form the backbone of the Playoff bracket, including seedings and whatever at-large berths remain, but we would discard it for this part? Thats weird.

You could have a scenario where the fourth- and fifth-place SEC teams are both 9-3, but the fifth-place one is ranked No.

12 and the fourth-place one is No.

18.

So now all five are getting in because the fifth-place team gets an at-large.

For all the bellyaching about the committee, including by athletic directors and coaches, Im puzzled why there has been no discussion of simply updating the selection parameters.

The original, intentionally vague version is a dozen years old and was created for a four-team field.

Why not update it to specifically state that schedule strength is the No.

1 factor, that losing a tough nonconference game doesnt count the same as losing to the 10th-place team in your league, etc.? Advertisement You may disagree with some of the basketball committees decisions, but every bracketologist knows the most important criteria: NET rankings, Quad 1 wins, nonconference schedule strength, etc.

Twelve years in, were still largely flying blind in football.

In the not-so-old days my team, Oklahoma State, never really had a chance at being national champs.

It was possible, sure, but the realities behind recruiting elite depth with facilities, media attention, geography, donor base, etc., made it unlikely (though 2011 was incredibly close).

Why does it feel like the deck is stacked even more against programs like mine? As the Power 2 and House settlement realities tighten the noose, what am I cheering for anymore? Not losing? Mike S.

Oklahoma State is an interesting example to use because outside of Oregon/Phil Knight, its the one program in the pre-NIL area that worked its way to national relevance specifically because of the largesse of one donor, the late T.

Boone Pickens.

I wonder what its collective might look like these days were he still with us.

Is the deck increasingly stacked against everyone outside of the Big Ten and SEC? Yes.

But has it changed Oklahoma States year-in, year-out prospects? If anything, the Cowboys have a far better chance of making the 12-team Playoff than they did the four-team version, although they came as close as humanly possible in the 2021 Big 12 title game against Baylor.

They are guaranteed a spot if they win the conference, and they no longer are in the same conference as longtime tormentor Oklahoma and money-bags Texas.

What seems much less likely now, however, is the 2011 scenario, when the Cowboys finished No.

3 in the BCS standings (they should have been No.

2) and came within a hair of playing for the national championship game.

Today, Oklahoma State can make the Playoff, but can it win two or three games and reach the championship? Probably not.

Advertisement If I were a fan of a program like that one, Id be less bothered by Playoff access than the fact that most of its regular-season games are now relegated to the equivalent of a music festival side stage.

Big 12 games vanished almost entirely from ABC last season now that the SEC has that real estate.

(Oklahoma State was an exception thanks to its Week 2 game against Arkansas.) The Cowboys played half their games on FS1, ESPN2 or ESPN-plus.

With the Big Ten and SEC now dominating the marquee television windows, the Big 12 almost feels like a mid-major basketball conference that flies under the radar during the season but still produces several NCAA Tournament teams.

Case in point, what percentage of fans outside of the Big 12 saw Arizona State play last season before the conference title game? Would 10 percent be too high? Thats a big part of the stacked deck perception.

At what point do the Big Ten and SEC run into antitrust issues with becoming mega conferences and boxing out the Big 12, ACC and Group of 5 in the CFP? Stephen O., New Orleans Its a good question, one I discussed with a lawyer friend this week.

But it may be a year late.

The other conferences agreed to the new CFP contract back in February 2024, in which they acquiesced to the Power 2s demands for unequal revenue distribution and the authority to make format changes without the others approval.

The time to object was then, but the others must have felt they needed the Big Ten and SEC more than the SEC and Big Ten needed them.

That being said, theres a long history of various states attorney generals or congressmen/senators going to bat for schools in their footprint that may be negatively affected.

Lately, that has involved a lot of antitrust cases against the NCAA, but once upon a time their favorite target was the BCS.

Advertisement After Utah, then in the Mountain West, went undefeated in 2008, that states attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, made a years-long ruckus about possibly suing the BCS, claiming it was an illegal monopoly.

He never actually filed it.

But he became the first of several parties, including eventually the Justice Departments antitrust division, that took an interest in college footballs postseason.

It all finally went away once the BCS became the CFP.

Someone much smarter than me, preferably with a law degree, would need to weigh in on whether two conferences, rather than the CFP itself, could face similar scrutiny.

Normally I love your takes on CFB.

But you fired at the wrong target this week.

Year in and year out both the Big Ten and SEC are by far the best and most dominant conferences.

That is fact, not opinion.

So, yeah, those two probably have a legitimate right to each demand four of the available tournament spots.

Jim Pendergast, Virginia Beach, Va.

They produce more CFP-caliber teams than the other leagues, which is exactly why they dont need automatic berths.

GO DEEPER Mandel: Big Ten, SEC leaders set to light college football aflame Your old colleague Max Olson reported that Texas Tech spent $10 million this offseason on 17 transfers.

Others spent huge on transfers and recruiting.

Is there any fear or anger from other schools that the fair value market price is being blown out of the water and constantly being raised? Ryan K., Lexington, Ky.

Theres concern.

But never fear, the House settlement is here! All the problems will be solved.

Im only half-kidding.

Whether its naivete, wishful thinking or both, a lot of college administrators have been counting on the House settlement, which could be approved in April, to rein in the NIL market.

For one thing, theres the revenue-sharing component, in which schools will be able to directly spend $20.5 million on their rosters (in all sports) without having to depend on fan/booster donations.

And then theres the new NIL clearinghouse, as established by the settlement.

Heres how South Carolina AD Jeremiah Donati explained it to fans in a recent letter: As the settlement is currently written, NIL will look a lot different post July 1 when these new rules are adopted.

For example, all deals between third parties and student-athletes over $600 will be subject to an independent fair-market-value analysis on a case-by-case basis.

Deals that are above FMR after being reviewed by a clearing house will not be permissible for student-athletes to accept.

Advertisement You read that right.

A clearinghouse (being operated by Deloitte) is going to tell athletes they cant accept a $1 million offer from Collective X because its analysis determined theyre only worth $200,000.

Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits.

College administrators continue to cling to the notion that the market for college athletes should operate differently than almost any other in this country, including in their own business.

No clearinghouse approves AD or coaching salaries or the salaries of any athletic department or university employee.

For the 8,000th time, the only way theyre ever going to be allowed to cap athletes earnings, and thus slow down the ever-escalating price tags, is via collective bargaining.

But that would require acknowledging the athletes as employees.

And they dont want that.

Florida State went into last season with a lot of hype, and we know what happened.

Is this something you expect to happen regularly in the era of the transfer portal and NIL? Is there a highly regarded team you think might face-plant this year the way FSU did? Mike H.

I do expect it to happen regularly, although probably not to the extent of FSU, falling from 13-1 to 2-10.

That feels like a once-in-20-years type phenomenon.

Two things that are nearly impossible for someone outside a program to quantify are culture and chemistry.

FSU lost a whole lot of both when that core group of leaders, including Jordan Travis and Jared Verse, headed off to the NFL.

In the old days, teams would have players who learned from them and were ready to take over when their turn came.

But thats more difficult than ever for coaches because some of the young players who dont play right away go into the transfer portal, and the incoming players might not mesh well with the incumbents.

On paper, the team that most closely resembles FSU this time last year is Ohio State.

The Buckeyes lost nearly every key leader from their national title team, plus both coordinators.

And yet we all just assume theyll be fine because its Ohio State.

But theres one huge difference between the two: Ohio State has been successfully reloading for more than 20 years.

FSU had just a two-year run under Mike Norvell before everything imploded.

Advertisement I feel confident saying Jeremiah Smith, Caleb Downs and friends will not go 2-10.

Id also keep an eye on Oregon, where Dan Lanning has been leaning heavily on the portal for several years, particularly at quarterback.

It has worked, but he could very well have a year where they just whiff on a bunch of those transfers.

Maybe it will be this year.

And then theres Ole Miss, where Im not sure Lane Kiffin is even trying to develop his own players at this point.

Last years 9-3 team started as many as 17 transfers, including stars like Jaxson Dart and Jared Ivey who were there for multiple seasons, most of whom have moved on.

And now comes a whole new class of transfers to take their place.

I could see it producing double-digit starters, especially on defense.

Ole Miss is my early leader to go from 10 wins to missing a bowl entirely.

But there will be others.

Besides Clemson and Florida State, are there any other schools that would increase TV revenue for the Big Ten or SEC if added? Nick, Charleston, S.C.

Besides Notre Dame? None.

And I wouldnt assume FSU and Clemson are gimmes, either.

The Big Ten didnt see its per-school revenue go up at all for Oregon and Washington, hence why theyre taking half shares for six more years.

FSU and Clemson are presumably bigger TV brands, but how much bigger? Not Oklahoma/Texas big.

I believe FSU and Clemson would be more valuable to the Big Ten than they would to the SEC, which is already entrenched in that part of the country and is not exactly hurting for national championship-caliber programs.

Is Clemson-LSU all that different than Tennessee-LSU? Whereas the Big Ten getting into the South likely would be seen as a big value-add.

Ohio State at Florida State? Clemson at Michigan? Those are eight-to-10 million viewer matchups.

As for other schools, Miami 20 years ago would have been a no-brainer, but Miami today is a diminished brand.

I hear people gush about North Carolina, but North Carolina rarely has been a nationally relevant football program, and basketball alone isnt a significant revenue driver.

I just want the Big Ten to add Hawaii to see if the conference can still pull off its maps advertisement in 30 seconds.

(Top photo of Greg Sankey: Jeffrey Vest / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images).

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