College football fans may not have known Tony Petitti’s name before this week, but they were certainly familiar with his work — even if few realized it at the time. He was, after all, a key player in one of the biggest changes in the sport’s history.
Former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer is often considered the father of the Bowl Championship Series, which, beginning in 1998, pitted the nation’s top two teams against one another in a national championship game for the first time in more than a century. But it was Petitti, then the vice president of programming at ABC Sports, who actually made it happen.
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The preceding Bowl Alliance didn’t include the Big Ten, the Pac-12 or the Rose Bowl. Petitti and ABC Sports’ initial attempts to persuade those three parties to join a larger bowl structure with a national championship game were unsuccessful. ABC Sports later convinced Kramer on what would become the BCS, and the conferences and the Rose Bowl eventually got in line. Kramer told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that if he was the father of the BCS, Petitti was the No. 1 son.
“The only reason the BCS existed was because of Tony Petitti,” former ABC Sports president Steve Bornstein told The Athletic this week. “I got a lot of credit, but he was the person behind it. He did everything on that. It was his dedication, his initiative and his unwillingness to take no for an answer that got it done.”
Twenty-seven years later, the man who tried to convince Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany to buy into the BCS is now the commissioner of the Big Ten himself. Petitti, 62, was officially announced as the seventh commissioner of the league on Wednesday, and he will begin his tenure on May 15. He succeeds Kevin Warren, who spent just three-and-a-half years in the big chair but made monumental changes with the additions of USC and UCLA and the construction of a massive new television deal.
Petitti now sits front and center, one of the most powerful people in college sports.
At first glance, Petitti’s resume — which includes stints at Major League Baseball, various broadcast networks and video game/esports company Activision Blizzard — indicates yet another outsider has been hired as a major college conference commissioner. But those who know him well describe a consummate consensus-builder, an innovative thinker and a man drawn to big-time college sports over and over again. The son of a New York City police officer, Petitti may not be the loudest voice in a room. But he’ll be the one you want to listen to.
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“He’s the most creative person you’ll ever meet,” said Harold Reynolds, who has worked as an MLB Network analyst since the network launched in 2009. “He’s got this keen sense of being able to look into the future and crystallize it.
“As the world continues to evolve, he’s going to continue to be out in front of everybody.”
Friends say that lessons from his Italian father and a blue-collar upbringing laid the foundation of the man Petitti would become. A bright young student and a strong multi-sport athlete, Petitti played baseball at Haverford College and eventually graduated from Harvard Law School. Later in his career as a TV executive, Petitti often brought his father to big sporting events.
Petitti’s former colleagues at CBS Sports and ABC Sports described someone who loved to deal with college sports. After school and two years at a law firm, he joined ABC Sports in 1988 as a general attorney and later moved into programming, where he worked on the acquisition and scheduling of college football and basketball games, along with other sports like NASCAR.
“He adored Keith Jackson,” said Tim Brando, the longtime broadcaster who worked under Petitti at both ABC/ESPN and CBS. “He was always really into what we were doing in college sports.”
After helping create the BCS, Petitti went to CBS Sports in 1997 to be a senior vice president and later returned as executive VP for all sports programming and an executive producer. At CBS, he worked closely with Mike Aresco, now the American Athletic Conference commissioner, on college sports programming. Petitti and Aresco had previously worked together with ABC/ESPN, and Brando described them as tied at the hip when it came to college sports events like the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and bowl games. The two shared texts this week as word of the Big Ten hire got out. The AAC commissioner called him a perfect fit.
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“He has a quiet manner,” Aresco said. “He’s quietly effective. He doesn’t showboat. I think he’ll fit the Big Ten culture very well.”
Brando said Petitti would spend Saturday afternoons in the CBS studio to watch college football and engage the studio team about the latest goings-on in the sport.
“The top brass at networks are all there on Sundays (for the NFL), but not everybody comes in on Saturday. Tony never missed a Saturday that I was there,” Brando said. “He was always into it big-time. If anything exciting happened in a game, he’d love to talk about what this or that means.”
Brando tweeted in 2021 that the Pac-12 should consider Petitti to be its commissioner. Petitti’s desire to learn the entire workings of an organization helped him understand everyone’s role and how each decision affected them, colleagues said.
“When he came to CBS Sports, he became a student of every component and every contributor to the sports division,” said LeslieAnne Wade, the former senior VP of communications at CBS Sports. “He’d sit in our offices, spend time with us and take it back to (higher-ups).”
He also helped with golf programming on CBS, including events like the Masters. He’s still on the USGA executive committee and reports a 7.1 golf handicap. Longtime CBS Sports announcer Jim Nantz wrote briefly about Petitti’s relationship with golf and his father in Nantz’s 2008 memoir, “Always By My Side.”
“On weekends, they would drive out to Long Island’s famed public course in Bethpage, arriving at 4:00 a.m. to reserve a tee time and then sleeping in the car,” Nantz wrote. “In 1999, Tony brought his father out to play Pebble Beach and Cypress Point. John Petitti passed away five years afterward, and to this day, like me and countless others, Tony says that he cannot go back to Pebble without thinking of his dad and the warm memories of their special rounds together.”
MLB Network officially debuted on Jan. 1, 2009, the fourth of the major American sports leagues to launch a 24-hour cable channel. Petitti, who had left CBS to take on the project, had big ideas for a sport both primed for and resistant to innovation.
“He immerses himself in whatever project he’s involved with,” said Matt Vasgersian, MLB Network’s first studio host. “When this network started, he was a TV guy who liked baseball. The TV acumen was always something that he had, but he kind of immersed himself in the culture of baseball, to the point where he absolutely became a baseball guy.”
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Reynolds described multiple ways in which Petitti innovated at MLB Network, from the regular use of live look-ins to the diamond set that allowed analysts to grab a bat and take a swing or field a ground ball to illustrate a point.
“People didn’t do that stuff,” Reynolds said. “Now, you turn on any channel. NFL Network, anybody. They’re all out on the field trying to demo stuff. They’re running pass patterns. We did all that before anybody dreamed of it.”
When Petitti went on to work directly for Major League Baseball as its deputy commissioner and COO from 2014 to 2020, he continued to innovate. People who work in and around the sport credit him with many of baseball’s positive changes, from the expanded playoff format to successful one-off events such as the “Field of Dreams” games.
He left MLB for Activision Blizzard in August 2020 to be its president of sports and entertainment but left that company less than a year later as a result of what friends and colleagues say was a bad fit.
“He’s a high-powered executive and he has big vision,” said Bornstein, who previously served as an Activision Blizzard executive but didn’t overlap with Petitti there. “The horizon wasn’t as large there as it will be with the Big Ten. This makes a heck of a lot more sense.”
Many administrators had speculated that this job would go to someone with years of experience working in college sports, perhaps at a campus or two. Warren’s Big Ten tenure included the highest of highs but also some very low lows, the latter coming in large part because of his unfamiliarity with the collegiate landscape and lack of pre-existing relationships. He announced in January that he was leaving the conference to return to his roots in the NFL, taking over as the president and COO of the Chicago Bears without finishing out his initial contract with the Big Ten. His first day with the Bears is April 17.
Petitti’s hire sent shockwaves through the industry, and not just because he steps into one of the most important jobs in college sports. Like Warren, the Pac-12’s George Kliavkoff and the Big 12’s Brett Yormark, Petitti was chosen by university presidents despite his lack of experience working directly in college sports.
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Petitti’s background makes him well-equipped for whatever changes may come, whether they concern college sports’ business model or any potential conference realignment down the road. Petitti will also oversee the integration of USC and UCLA into the league, which will stretch his creativity when it comes down to scheduling, logistics and travel.
Asked why the league would opt for a media executive when the Big Ten just signed seven-year media deals with FOX, CBS and NBC and no imminent deal to negotiate, an industry source responded that it’s never a bad idea to hire someone with this type of resume. A Big Ten source pointed out that the longform contracts from the deals announced last August still need to be executed, and that they will take quite a bit of work.
Petitti will also be involved in media rights negotiations tied to the expansion of the College Football Playoff; the CFP stakeholders still need to renegotiate the deal for the 2024 and 2025 seasons under the 12-team format and may then essentially start from scratch for 2026 and beyond. It’s a contract worth billions of dollars and an important revenue stream for all involved. Petitti will be at the CFP meeting later this month in Dallas.
“That’s going to be a major challenge for us to figure out — what kind of media deal we want to do,” Aresco said. “The length of it, partners, all of that. … We obviously value Tony’s input.”
Internally, Petitti’s main priorities upon taking over the Big Ten will be to build relationships as well as consensus. Commissioners in college sports report to university presidents, athletic directors and coaches; they do not have the same type of unilateral decision-making power that their counterparts in professional sports have. Petitti is known as a leader who instills a particular sense of loyalty among those he oversees.
“He’s really good at getting everybody to pull on the same side of the rope,” Vasgersian said. “That’s not an easy thing in any leadership role, and Tony not only had a really good idea as to who was good and who was full of s—, but he’d also tell you what you don’t want to hear. You’d think about it, and you’re like, ‘Damn it — that was in my best interest.’”
Reynolds said those working with Petitti in the Big Ten will have to get used to making their points quickly. He’s a great storyteller and dinner companion, Reynolds said, but “when it comes down to work, you’ve only got two minutes to get your words in. … You’ve got to come in and say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking.’ You’ve got 30 seconds to tell him something or else you’re not going to be heard.”
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But Petitti will listen. Reynolds said the mark of a great leader is his or her interest in other people’s perspectives. Petitti not only listens to others’ suggestions, but he also has an uncanny ability to garner support for them. And his own.
Which brings us back to the formation of the BCS, a pivotal moment in the history of college football. Reflecting upon that monumental decision, Petitti told the LA Times in 2006 it was not a perfect system to determine the sport’s national champion, but that it was better than what existed before.
And he admitted that a true playoff would be better.
“It’s the last great sporting event to be created,” Petitti said.
Now he returns to college sports, where a new expanded College Football Playoff is coming. He’ll once again play a big role in shaping the future of the sport. This time, you’ll know it’s him.
(Top photo: Tony Dejak /AP)