Big Ten reveals new football scheduling model for 18-team league: How this changes the conference

The Big Ten conference announced Thursday each school’s home and away Big Ten opponents for the 2024 through the 2028 football seasons, underscoring how challenging these schedules are going to be for all teams in the new 18-team league.

USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington all become official Big Ten members next summer. The league had to revise its previously announced scheduling model and pairings after adding to the two Pacific Northwest schools in August.

Here are the highlights of the updated schedule:

Michigan will play three of the former Pac-12 schools in 2024, with a road trip to Washington to go along with home games against Oregon and USC. Ohio State will travel to Eugene to play Oregon in the Ducks’ first year in the Big Ten.
USC will play either Michigan or Ohio State each of its first five years in the league.
Conference schedules include 12 protected annual matchups: Illinois-Northwestern, Illinois-Purdue, Indiana-Purdue, Iowa-Minnesota, Iowa-Nebraska, Iowa-Wisconsin, Maryland-Rutgers, Michigan-Michigan State, Michigan-Ohio State, Minnesota-Wisconsin, Oregon-Washington and UCLA-USC.
There will be no divisions, and the Big Ten Championship Game will include the top two teams in the overall conference standings.
There were 262 versions of the schedule before the office found the one that matched its preferences.

“You look at it, and you see the quality of the matchups,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said. “We just couldn’t be more excited about what you see on paper, what it really looks like.”

Each Big Ten member school will play every other conference opponent at least twice — once home and once away — over a five-year period, and each will play rotating opponents no more than three times in a five-year period.

There were some significant changes. Every team changed at least four games from the original schedule. Ohio State, for instance, plays only two of the originally scheduled home opponents (Michigan and Iowa) and two of the original road foes (Michigan State and Penn State). The Buckeyes will travel to Oregon instead of UCLA and there was a location change with Northwestern (was home, now away).

“If you look at a five-year snapshot, it’s 405 total games,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny said. “What we wanted to try to do was make sure that we showed our work this time. So it takes a five-year rotation to make sure that everybody plays at least once home and once a week against every other Big Ten opponent. That was a principle that was really important the last time around to our ADs and our coaches and still remains at the forefront of those conversations.”

Tiebreaking procedures for the Big Ten championship game will be announced later, as will the actual dates of games for the upcoming 2024 season. The first year of the 18-team Big Ten will also be the first season of the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff.

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West Coast influence

The four newcomers each will make at least four trips to the East Coast (Penn State, Maryland, Rutgers) over the five-year period. UCLA is the only school making five. Big Ten scheduling consultant Kevin Pauga said he tried to balance time zones in addition to other travel concerns.

Kenny said Thursday the Big Ten will not have 9 a.m. PT local games in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Calif., Eugene, Ore., or Seattle, although teams from the West Coast may play in games that kick off at 11 a.m. CT or noon ET on the road.

There was consideration of having all four West Coast teams play one another annually but that was discarded in favor of protecting only USC-UCLA and Oregon-Washington. Instead, the non-protected West Coast series will compete three times over the five-year period.

“We looked at a variety of different options,” Kenny said. “It included games against one another each year as all being protected opponents. It involved only having the UCLA-USC and Oregon-Washington games protected and somewhere in between with a couple of other different versions where we landed on it.

“Looking at it from a bigger picture perspective, we felt that it still met the the outcome of keeping West Coast football important for those four schools and creating some of those matchups that have done so well competitively and historically from a tradition perspective within those four teams in the past, but also really looking at our integration process as a whole in the Big Ten.”

Competitive balance

There is a hierarchy of the 18-team Big Ten football conference consisting of historic powers like Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and USC, annual competitive programs like Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin and Iowa plus others such as UCLA, Michigan State and Northwestern which routinely have competed for league titles.

In order to provide balanced scheduling, a scheduling matrix was developed. It first included two tiers of nine teams, then three tiers of six teams and finally six tiers of three teams.

“Our goal was to try and create those opportunities where we eliminated the outliers,” Kenny said. “So the hardest schedule and the easiest schedule on paper should all be around a consistent equator line as you look across all 18.”

The 262nd schedule was the only one in which all 18 teams had four or five games against each of the nine-team tiers established.

Scheduling with a CFP emphasis

It’s no secret that the Big Ten wants to make sure it has multiple CFP contenders each year, now that there will be more at-large access than ever before in a 12-team bracket. So, the conference wants to ensure that its best teams have challenging schedules that give them plenty of opportunities for resume-boosting wins — and also the opportunity to make up for losses. The key, of course, is to have the CFP selection committee value schedules like these. Teams that challenge themselves deserve to be rewarded for it, and teams with a couple of losses need to stay in CFP contention. Strength of schedule is on the list of criteria for CFP selection, though it’s been harder to lean on in a four-team model than a 12-team model.

“The schedule has to matter when teams are qualifying for the postseason, and that’s our job,” Petitti said.

Translation: The commissioners and presidents who oversee the CFP have to make sure that’s emphasized.

Still to come

There are opponents for the 2024 schedule, but there are no games scheduled quite yet. The work on a full schedule already has started.

“If you ask our athletic directors, they would have said we need that schedule yesterday,” Kenny said. “We’ve been building this model in the background as we’ve been building the actual opponent rotation. And so there’s already a model.

“We’ve got a call scheduled (Pauga) and I (Friday) afternoon to really start to go through some of, we call them pain points. Things that if we can avoid them, let’s avoid them, but at least have some defensible rationale of why things ended up the way that they did if it needs to be a certain way.”

Background reading

On June 8, the Big Ten unveiled a two-year scheduling model for 16 teams that included every school playing one another at least once. Like in the 18-game model, there are an uneven amount of rivalries but over the two-year frame, each program faced three teams twice and the remaining 12 teams once.

A key tenet was to allow every four-year player to compete at least once on every campus. But when the Big Ten welcomed Washington and Oregon on Aug. 4, that model became obsolete. Instead of forfeiting the Flex Protect-Plus plan, which then kept 11 historical or geographic rivalries intact each year, the league chose to stretch some campus visits beyond four years. Now, every school will play every other schools twice — home and away — over a five-year period.

“That was a principle that was really important to our ADs and our coaches and still remains at the forefront,” Kenny said.