Doyel: Why did Northwestern women have to forfeit? Because Big Ten sold its soul to SEC.
This is what happens when man-made greed meets a natural disaster: The women at Northwestern are forced to forfeit.
You hear how the Big Ten is handling the Northwestern women’s basketball team’s decision not to squeeze an expensive, lengthy — and unplanned — trip to Los Angeles to make up two games canceled in January by the wildfires? The Big Ten is making the Wildcats forfeit.
News from USA Today: Northwestern given forfeits after not playing UCLA, USC amid wildfires
In the most basic of ways, Northwestern was going to lose these games regardless. By forfeit, by blowout, whatever. UCLA is 26-1, 14-1 in the Big Ten, and ranked No. 2 in the country. Southern California (25-2, 15-1) is ranked No. 3.
Northwestern is 9-17, 2-13 in the Big Ten.
Correction: The Wildcats are now 2-15 in the Big Ten, and the team’s website has been updated to show as much. Interestingly, the same Northwestern website shows its overall record still at 9-17. An oversight? Perhaps.
Pushing back, a little, at a conference that has bigfooted its smaller members before, out of greed? That’s what I’m thinking. Because I remember what happened during the COVID-shortened season of 2020, when the Indiana football team earned the right to play in the Big Ten title game as the East Division champion, but the league rewrote its rules on the fly to put Ohio State in there instead.
That’s when the Big Ten started to become something ugly, something mean, something … well, something very SEC-like. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti is the Elon Musk to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey’s Donald Trump, teaming up to win on a scoreboard that shows, in their view, only two categories: money and power.
The SEC and Big Ten have more of both than everyone else, so the SEC and Big Ten are the winners.
They’re cruel, power-mad jerks, but so what. Doesn’t seem to matter much these days, does it?
Big Ten: SEC's lackey, not partner
You see the latest power play from Sankey and his trusted lackey, I mean sidekick, Petitti — right? Trying to turn the College Football Playoff into the SEC-Big Ten Invitational?
These guys, these power-drunk commissioners at the forefront of the ruination of college sports, are trying to bend the rest of college football to their will by forcing the 12-team CFP to expand to 14 or 16 teams, with a nice little bonus for the SEC and Big Ten: four automatic bids, each, every year.
Never mind if the SEC — well, if the Big Ten — ever has a season where two or three conference teams, tops, belong in the playoff. Sankey and Petitti are using their power, meaning their TV contracts, to force the rest of the country to go along with it. Hasn’t happened yet, but it will. What the SEC wants, the SEC gets. Especially now that it has turned the Big Ten into its Mini-Me, the 16-team SEC effectively becoming a voting bloc of 34 schools.
You think the SEC, and Sankey, actually consider the Big Ten (and Petitti) to be equal? No chance. Someday, we’ll see the proof of that. Don’t ask me what it will look like, or how it will happen, but the day will come when the SEC will face a choice: Placating the Big Ten, or making like the great whale it is and cutting the suckerfish loose — and going in another direction that will benefit the SEC even more.
Just watch.
Ever think about that, Petitti? Or were you too busy punishing Northwestern because Los Angeles burned down?
Big Ten is America; Pac-12 was Greenland
You want to like the Big Ten, don’t you? Promise you, I do. It’s the hometown conference, for all of us. IU belongs, Purdue belongs, our neighbors in Illinois and Michigan and Wisconsin belong. When it comes to college sports, the Big Ten is who we are.
But sometimes, we make mistakes. Who we are? We can be ugly. Look at America right now. Two rich men are dismantling the U.S. government, and being cheered by tens of millions of citizens because, I guess, it beats being on the other team.
Winning is fun, right? We see it in sports all the time, Patriots fans celebrating the Super Bowl titles of cheating Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, or LSU basketball fans being OK with Will Wade, even as the FBI had him talking crazy on a wiretap, because he was winning. LSU loves Kim Mulkey and Brian Kelly, too. Awful people. Great coaches. Geaux Tigers, right?
This is us. Americans, I’m saying.
And this is the Big Ten, ditching all pretense of decency. Better to win as a bully than lose with honor. On a macro-level, it’s easy to see what is happening, how greedy and gluttonous — how SEC-like — the Big Ten has become. It would be easy to dislike this new Big Ten, except for this one thing:
Your team plays in the Big Ten, right? And you’d rather your team play there than, say, the Big 12 or ACC or Pac-12 or Pac-2 or whatever they’re calling it. Because those leagues are for losers.
And the Big Ten rocks!
The Big Ten’s thirst for power has only grown since it stole UCLA and USC from its one-time partner in the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC alliance. Remember that? Those three conferences came together in 2021 because they could see what the SEC was doing, looking around the college sports landscape like America now looks at Canada and Greenland and the Panama Canal — as property to annex.
But then the Big Ten saw a better way: Annex property of its own. Become so big, the SEC wouldn’t dare raid it. Don’t fight back against the villainous SEC — join it.
The Big Ten knifed in the back its alliance partner of 10 months, the Pac-12, by swiping UCLA and USC in June 2022. The Big Ten went for its former alliance partner’s throat in 2023 by adding Oregon and Washington. Now the Big Ten has 18 teams, too big for even the SEC to swallow.
So the Big Ten has become what it once hated — the SEC — only, frankly, uglier. This league is now so big, with schools stationed from coast to coast, that it doesn’t make financial or academic sense for Northwestern to squeeze a three-day trip to Los Angeles to play two games in a lost season.
So the Wildcats, who stayed out of Los Angeles as the wildfires were raging — who did the right thing, the safe thing, the humane thing — have been punished by a league that has grown so stupidly big, so powerful, that it makes up rules as it goes, starting with this one:
Size matters.
More than honor, more than integrity, more than common decency — size matters. It trumps all.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Threads, or on BlueSky and Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar, or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.