INDIANAPOLIS – The most revealing moment of new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti’s first football-media-days address in his new job came the one time he refused to address part of a question directed his way.

Engaging and thorough, Petitti navigated his first state-of-the-conference speech without incident. He held the party line on name, image and likeness, saying what he called “true NIL” is good for athletes but that college sports need Congressional intervention to ferret out bad actors. He spoke at length about the success and prestige of the league’s various sports. He even name-checked a pair of recently introduced bipartisan pieces of federal legislation attempting to tackle the NIL question.

Generally, Petitti faced forward, intent upon highlighting the bright future of the Big Ten he inherits. The only time he was asked to look back, he declined to. Privately, he will know that’s where his biggest problems are.

Petitti arrives to a Big Ten awash in media rights money, poised to expand its footprint all the way to the West Coast and positioned as favorably in the wars to come — NIL, Playoff expansion, etc. — as any of its competitors.

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And yet, Petitti also inherits a league wrought with dysfunction. Perhaps not in living memory have its members held so little faith in or so much skepticism of the Big Ten home office itself. After 3 ½ years of big successes masking a thousand small, destructive fires lit during Kevin Warren’s tenure, Petitti’s first big job will be simply winning his conference’s trust back.

Take the aforementioned question, for example.

When he was hired, Warren knew one of his key remits would be the delivery of a fresh conference TV deal experts believed should break $1 billion and could promise as much as $100 million per year, per school. Warren brokered that deal, a sweeping agreement that divorced the Big Ten completely from ESPN, dug the conference in more deeply with Fox and ushered in partnerships with NBC and CBS. Final bill: more than $7 billion, across seven years.

But there were devils in the details. More games would be pushed to streaming, for example. Losing ESPN meant losing long-standing partnerships, like the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. Different revenue streams will come online at different times, unevenly distributing the financial impact of the agreements. And in May, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported many of the agreements contained within weren’t even finalized, those revenues unsecured and a conference of athletic directors — weary after three chaotic years — frustrated to learn their bottom lines weren’t entirely guaranteed.

“I’m not going to speak to the work that was done before I got (to the Big Ten)," Petitti said to one question Wednesday.

Warren’s wins — the media rights deal, conference expansion, Playoff expansion — were large, but they were few, and to some extent they would’ve been difficult to screw up. The conference’s failures during his tenure were often lower profile, but much more day-to-day frustrating to the schools, departments and programs they affected.

Top-down leadership structures were disassembled and replaced with more confusing organizational flow charts. It became difficult for member schools to know where to go for answers to basic questions, and sometimes simply who to ask.

Long-standing conference employees departed, leaving decades of institutional memory behind that was rarely replaced or revised. Issues with scheduling and procedure became more commonplace. Increasingly, coaches and administrators learned to treat promises from the conference office with skepticism, as many winding up forgotten as fulfilled.

The greatest public discord of Warren’s tenure erupted around the 2020 football season. After Warren and the conference’s Council of Presidents and Chancellors shut down the season citing COVID-19 concerns, multiple programs began openly threatening to play their seasons anyway, as independents if they had to.

Eventually, the Big Ten restored a conference-only season, and publicly the rebellious members got back in line. Privately, some still openly flouted the league’s COVID protocols without punishment, and the Big Ten’s decision to limit other sports’ seasons to conference games alone caused setbacks farther down the food chain.

All this, from the conference that prided itself on being the proverbial adult in the room of college athletics. Not only was the Big Ten one of the nation’s most powerful leagues, it was also the one that never hung its dirty laundry in public. Former commissioner Jim Delany took care to ensure votes for major changes to the Big Ten landscape were unanimous. Publicly, the conference intentionally acted as one.

All of which made the discord and disharmony of the COVID season and what came after it so jarring. With organizational guidance lacking, missteps regular and membership trust cratering, a conference once famous for its unity and maturity lost both.

There became a feeling the league office couldn’t be trusted to lead effectively, and that not enough was done to promote the Big Ten’s interests. When Warren left to run the Chicago Bears last spring, his departure was met with a shrug.

Now enters Petitti, who can thank Warren for clearing the biggest items off his agenda. The new commissioner talked at length Wednesday about NIL issues, his desire for federal intervention, the challenges associated with adapting USC and UCLA into the conference and more.

Quizzed on expansion, Petitti said his sole instruction on new membership from the COPC has centered on integrating the Los Angeles schools.

“All the direction I'm getting from leadership — our presidents and chancellors and our athletic directors — is to focus on USC and UCLA," he said. "We have a lot of work to do there.”

The regular presence Wednesday of television analysts Gary Danielson (CBS), Joel Klatt (Fox) and Todd Blackledge (NBC) appeared an attempt to promote synergy among the Big Ten’s new three-network partnership, as Petitti promised fans will “move seamlessly” between the three.

Everyone held hands, and the trains ran on time, in other words. After nearly four years of uncustomary instability, in a conference proud for so many years that neither word could ever describe it, this was a good start, if only that.

Perhaps the most telling moment of Petitti’s Wednesday came (again) while discussing that TV deal.

At one point during his half-hour address to the media at Lucas Oil Stadium, Petitti promised that “significant progress” has been made toward completing the media rights arrangements that were announced almost a year ago and kick in starting next month.

In other words, the deals aren’t final. There’s work left to do.

An apt metaphor for the job Petitti now faces — even the stuff that seemed straightforward for the Big Ten’s new commissioner will be anything but.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Big 10 commissioner Tony Petitti must win back conference's trust