DETROIT – The Big Ten detailed its new football scheduling format on Thursday and announced each team’s protected rivals as the league prepares to increase to 16 members next year.
New Big Ten schedule format
Starting with the 2024 football season, the Big Ten will eliminate divisions as USC and UCLA join the existing 14 members and stretch the league’s footprint all the way to the West Coast. Since each team will continue to play nine conference games per year, there will be six opponents that aren’t a given team’s schedule every season.
This is still a very new problem for college football conferences. There’s no precedence for expansion of this magnitude.
League officials considered a fixed schedule format, with each Big Ten team having exactly three protected rivals and then playing the other 12 teams every other year -- six in Year A and then the other six in Year B, then back to the first six in Year C, but at the opposite site, etc.
Instead, the Big Ten chose a more flexible option, with every Big Ten team having between zero and three protected rivals. That will not only offer room to make schedules more even on a year-to-year basis, it’ll also ease some of the travel nightmares that come with adding two West Coast teams to a primarily Midwestern conference.
So, the way it works: Each team will play its protected rivals every single season, on a rotating home-and-away basis, as before. The rest of the schedule will be filled out by the Big Ten, with competitive balance and travel in mind, theoretically.
What does this mean?
This format isn’t as cut-and-dry as the fixed option, which would have been much cleaner. The predictability of being able to map out exactly which teams would be on the schedule (and whether they’d be home or away) would have been a nice luxury for traveling fans.
Obviously, the flexible format opens the door to some matchup manipulation by the league, but that comes with the territory when you sign an $8 billion multi-network television contract.
Some teams -- for example, Michigan and Ohio State -- will typically have more difficult conference schedules than the rest of the Big Ten due to their protected rivalry against each other.
Will the league level the playing field through the scheduling of their remaining matchups? Or will it be too tempting to exploit the brand recognition of those schools and chase more high-profile matchups? That remains to be seen.
Protected rivals
Here are the official protected rivals for every team in the Big Ten, as announced Thursday evening:
- Illinois: Purdue, Northwestern
- Indiana: Purdue
- Iowa: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska
- Maryland: Rutgers
- Michigan: Ohio State, Michigan State
- Michigan State: Michigan
- Minnesota: Wisconsin, Iowa
- Nebraska: Iowa
- Northwestern: Illinois
- Ohio State: Michigan
- Penn State: NONE
- Purdue: Indiana, Illinois
- Rutgers: Maryland
- UCLA: USC
- USC: UCLA
- Wisconsin: Minnesota, Iowa
