In the debate over which college football conference is strongest, the Southeastern Conference argues its superior depth makes up for the Big Ten winning the last three national titles.
The Big Ten calls its reputation as a top-heavy conference unfair.
Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti considers those three College Football Playoff championships — from Michigan in 2023, Ohio State in 2024 and Indiana in 2025 — testaments to the league’s strength from top to bottom.
“You cannot send your top teams out into the CFP unless they’ve played — and have them be successful, which we have been very successful — if they’re not going through a gauntlet in the regular season,” Petitti said this week. “This idea that the middle of our conference isn’t hard is just not right.”
The balance of power between college football’s heavyweight conferences has been a major talking point at the leagues’ media days.
Petitti spoke to reporters while standing beside the Big Ten’s three recent CFP trophies. Illinois coach Bret Bielema said the SEC was living in the past. Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said “there’s no doubt” the Big Ten is best.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Cignetti said. “We don’t run a hype machine up here in the Midwest. We believe everything is earned, not given. When we fall short, we say, ‘We fell short.’ We don’t cry a river, whine and complain. That’s why we’re the best.”
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey argued his league’s case a week earlier.
“When you look at our schedule, no one has created the kind of weekly competition that exists in the Southeastern Conference,” Sankey said.
Five different SEC schools combined to win 13 national titles from 2006-22, but no SEC team has reached any of the last three championship games.
In the first two years under a 12-team CFP format, seven different SEC schools have made a combined eight playoff appearances. The Big Ten had four schools total seven playoff berths.
Certain metrics support the idea that the 16-team SEC is stronger than the 18-school Big Ten at the bottom. ESPN’s Bill Connelly produces the SP+ rankings, a predictive measure rating each team’s efficiency while adjusting for tempo and an opponent’s strength.
The Big Ten had three of the top four teams in the 2025 season-ending SP+ rankings, while the SEC had nobody in the top five. But seven Big Ten programs ranked below the lowest SEC team on the list: No. 67 Kentucky.
Over the last two seasons, the Big Ten went 10-7 against the SEC, including a 3-0 playoff record and a 5-2 mark in other bowl games. The Big Ten won as an underdog in all five of those non-playoff victories.
Illinois produced two of those upsets, beating South Carolina in the Citrus Bowl in 2024 and defeating Tennessee in the Music City Bowl last season. So Bielema had reason to feel good about himself and his conference this week when he commented that SEC backers “kind of want to live in 2005 forever.”
The 2005 reference was curious because Texas won the title that season when it was still a Big 12 member, a year before the SEC began a string of seven straight titles. Bielema said he chose 2005 because that’s the year before his head coaching career began at Wisconsin.
“The transfer portal and revenue share or NIL, however you want to describe it, when those two elements came into college football, the whole world changed,” said Bielema, who went 29-34 while coaching SEC school Arkansas from 2013-17. “I mean, it’s overly obvious to say that, but I think anything to predate that is just a different time in college football. It just is.”
Fourteen of the 22 playoff games over the last two years have featured Big Ten teams, including two in which conference rivals faced off. No wonder even Big Ten coaches with SEC backgrounds claim bragging rights.
“I just look at what the stats are, you know, and the last three years, the national champion has come out of this conference,” said Purdue’s Barry Odom, who went 25-25 at Missouri from 2016-19. “You also look at the number of playoff wins compared to any other conference, we’ve won twice as many as the next conference in the playoffs.”
UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava has experience playing in both conferences after reaching the playoff with Tennessee in 2024.
“I think it’s two great leagues — two great, physical leagues,” Iamaleava said. “I think the SEC brings a lot of physicality, but over the years, it’s kind of leveled out in terms of the playing field.
I think everybody is able to get high-level athletes. ... I think there’s definitely a lot of tough SEC teams, so that every week is going to be a game, but I feel the same way in the Big Ten.”
The intensity of the debate frustrates coaches eager to settle it on the field, perhaps with more head-to-head matchups.
“You never hear in the NFL, ‘Wow, the NFC’s better than the AFC,’” Washington coach Jedd Fisch said. “You don’t ever hear, ’Check us out, we’ve won the Super Bowl the last few years.' We’ve kind of made this some competition rather than just take a step back and say, ‘Who cares?’ Let’s play.”
AP freelance writer Luke DeCock contributed to this report.
AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football
FILE - Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti reacts during the second half of the College Football Playoff national championship game against Miami, Jan. 19, 2026, in Miami Gardens, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia launched an intense barrage of ballistic missiles and drones overnight into Saturday, killing at least nine people and wounding 33 civilians in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, authorities said.
The strikes follow a major Russian attack two days earlier that killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 50 others across Ukraine, as Moscow apparently looks to exploit Kyiv’s critical shortage of Western-supplied anti-ballistic missile defenses. The relentless cycle of attacks dims the potential of reaching a diplomatic end to Russia’s more than 4-year-old invasion of its neighbor.
A five-story residential building in the city's Solomianskyi District was damaged by falling debris and a fire broke out. Rescue workers evacuated 35 people from the upper floors of the building and two people died, with eight reported injured, including two children, according to Ukraine’s state emergency service.
In the Darnytskyi District of Kyiv, seven people were killed and another 14 injured after the attack caused fires and damage to houses, vehicles, an administrative and non-residential building, the emergency services said.
Elsewhere, emergency workers extinguished a fire in a non-residential building in the capital’s Shevchenkivskyi district. There was no additional information about earlier reports by the district mayor that people were trapped in another residential building.
Damage to commercial and residential buildings was reported in two other city districts.
Lithuania’s foreign minister said the country’s embassy in Kyiv was damaged when missiles struck nearby overnight.
Russia’s defense ministry said Saturday it had launched a “massive strike” against “Ukrainian military-industrial complex facilities and logistics centers in Kyiv.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pressed the United States and other Western partners over Ukraine’s need for more Patriot anti-ballistic missile defense systems to counter missile attacks from Russia.
“Every package of ballistic missile interceptors saves the lives of our people. And every night without them results in more casualties,” he wrote on X following the latest attacks.
The Ukrainian leader late Friday said he spoke to U.S. Vice President JD Vance and discussed a meeting with President Donald Trump earlier this week in Washington, which Zelenskyy described as “positive and productive.”
“The Russian air strikes on our country continue and air defense, specifically interceptors for Patriot systems against ballistic missiles, remains a top priority,” Zelenskyy said Friday in a post on Telegram.
At a NATO summit in Ankara in July, Trump said the U.S. would give Ukraine a license to make Patriot systems, but he appeared to move away from that commitment on Friday during a Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, saying he had not yet made a final decision on the matter.
From a basement shelter where she was taking cover as a second air alarm sounded for another wave, Liudmyla Nakonechna, 64, described how she was woken by loud explosions at 1:30 a.m.
“I ran into the corridor and was standing there when the bathroom door was blown off its hinges and struck me in the leg,” said Nakonechna, whose health is poor after undergoing cancer treatment. “I heard the sound of shattering glass. My balcony was covered in glass and it was completely blown apart, while the windows in my bedroom were also blown out.”
Nakonechna had not taken cover in a shelter since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, but the stress became too much, she said.
“It’s getting worse by the day,” Nakonechna said. “Whereas before there was an attack once every two weeks, or maybe once a week, now it happens practically every day. It is incredibly hard to bear this psychologically.”
— A Russian airstrike killed one person and wounded five more in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, local officials said Saturday.
— In Russian-occupied Crimea, the Moscow-appointed head of the city of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said Saturday that a 60-year-old woman was killed and two other people wounded in a drone attack on the city.
— Ukrainian drones struck three Russian oil refineries overnight in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, Zelenskyy said Saturday. The refineries “process millions of tons of oil each year” and are located nearly 1,600 kilometers (994 miles) from Ukraine, Zelenskyy said on social media.
The Russian online news outlet Astra reported Saturday that a Ukrainian drone set an oil refinery in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, ablaze. Local officials said debris from a downed drone caused “smoke” at an unnamed “industrial zone.”
Ukraine’s almost daily long-range drone and missile strikes using domestically developed weapons have battered Russian oil facilities for months. The operation has brought a fuel crisis that is embarrassing the Kremlin more than four years after Russia’s all-out invasion of its neighbor.
— A sanctioned Russian container ship, the Yanina, sank in the Black Sea after being hit by Ukrainian drones, Zelenskyy said Saturday, listing the ship as among “facilities that sustain the war effort.”
Russia’s state nuclear energy company, Rosatom, whose shipping subsidiary FESCO operates the vessel, said the ship was carrying “civilian goods” such as frozen food and construction materials.
Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a fire following Russian missile attacks in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a fire following Russian missile attacks in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a fire following Russian missile attacks in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a fire following Russian missile attacks in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
