Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has doubled down on his controversial expansion proposal for the College Football Playoff.

Now in his second year in charge of the conference, Petitti’s vision for the future stands in conflict with the proposals put forward by the SEC, ACC and Big 12, all of whom favour a 5-11 model that awards automatic berths to the top five conference champions. It appears that Petitti is taking inspiration from professional leagues and how they maintain relevancy for as many teams as possible throughout their regular season.

“I know people say this is not professional sports, this is college sports, but there are things you can learn from leagues that are extremely successful, and how they keep teams alive, how they have really meaningful regular seasons,” he told ESPN during the recent Big Ten media days. “That’s a valuable thing to study, because they do it really well.”

The format that Petitti is nailing his colours to would do away with auto-bids for conference champs, instead allotting a certain number of automatic qualifying spots per conference, specifically four each for the Big Ten and SEC, two each for the ACC and Big 12 and one for the top Group of Six team, with the remaining three places of the expanded 16-team field being ‘at large’ berths.

This skews more closely to an NFL style playoff model rather than the current or traditional CFP formats and clearly does not sit well with others. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark stated earlier in the month that ‘we do not need a professional model, because we are not the NFL. We are college football, and we must act like it’.

Petitti does however appear to have the backing of at least some of the coaches in his conference, who appear to feel that the league that has produced the two most recent national champions deserves to be recognised for the quality of its output.

“For the last two seasons, our conference showed its strength and dominance with back-to-back national champions,” Washington’s Jedd Fisch noted. “I don’t think you prepare any better for the NFL than playing in our conference. Every week, you have to travel, just like the NFL. It is not a regional league. It’s a national league. I would tell you, as we go, that’s why it’s so imperative we need four automatic bids, a nine-game schedule in the Big Ten Conference. We can’t leave it up to chance with a 5–11 combo.”

As well as the four automatic places, Petitti is pushing for ‘play-in’ games according to sources reported by Sports Illustrated. These suggest that Petitti wants, along with the top two teams playing off in conference title game — despite both already being rewarded with a playoff spot — there would be two further games, with the third- and sixth-placed teams and fourth- and fifth-placed teams facing off and the winner of each matchup gaining a place in the playoff.

This would provide two extra games for the conference, and potentially two extra paydays in terms of TV licensing.

“If Petitti gets his play-in format, sources say a likely broadcast plan would call for Fox to air the Big Ten championship game, as it currently does, with one of the play-in games on NBC and the other on CBS, the Big Ten’s other primary broadcast partners,” SI’s Pat Forde has reported.

However, all of this posturing and speculation could remain irrelevant for another year as the Big Ten and SEC, the two conferences with the power to impose a change to the playoff format, still refuse to agree on either a playoff format and scheduling. The Big Ten won’t budge until the SEC also agree to play a comparable nine conference games, while the SEC has made it clear that they think eight ‘in conference’ games is plenty enough. Until that impasse is breached — and, at present, this appears unlikely — it looks like the current 12-team format is here to stay for at least another year.