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This is exactly what we should have done
Posted on: June 9, 2023 at 12:10:45 CT
El Zorro MU
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Oh well......we'll get there someday.
Big Ten unveils scheduling model for 2024 and ’25, with up to 3 protected opponents per team
By Scott Dochterman and Nicole Auerbach
The Big Ten unveiled its new scheduling model and matchups for the 2024 and 2025 regular seasons on Thursday, ushering in the new era for a 16-team conference that stretches from coast to coast.
The model, as The Athletic previously reported, is more flexible than the formats peer conferences are using. It is called the Flex Protect Plus, and it gives each Big Ten team up to three protected annual opponents and cycles through all of the teams in the rest of the league. Each Big Ten team will play every other team in the league over a two-year span.
“I think the two-year component is the real important point here, because it allows you to not have to lock things in unnecessarily for longer periods of time,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny told The Athletic. “It’s a 3-6-6 maybe with a twist only because those three aren’t staying rigid the entire time.”
The model is designed to prioritize competitive balance, maintain each school’s most important rivalries and set up the conference for success in the new 12-team College Football Playoff era, which also begins in 2024. There are a total of 11 protected rivalry games each season.
Thursday’s announcement officially ends the Big Ten’s divisional era at the conclusion of 2023, with the final season of the East-West divide coming this fall.
Why did the schools support this model?
Different administrators had different preferences throughout the process, but there were a few important reasons this model gained the support it needed — including the ability to ensure there would never be three 9-0 teams in league play.
First, the flex model preserves the most important rival(s) for each school, a key priority for all. The games that need to be played annually will be played annually. Second, it helps current Big Ten schools avoid scenarios where they’d have to make two separate trips to the West Coast. Keeping USC and UCLA as each other’s only protected annual matchup will help schedule-makers sequence everyone else’s trips to play the L.A. teams in an equitable way. If, for example, Nebraska had been paired with UCLA and required to play at the Rose Bowl every other year, that would have made it harder to fairly cycle USC in and out of the Huskers’ rotation.
Every school still will appear on the schedule of every other Big Ten opponent in a two-year span. So, even for schools with different numbers of protected rivals, the overall schedules stand to be competitively similar. If Team A only plays one team annually, it will play everyone else more frequently than another Team B that plays three annual rivals. Everything will look and feel more balanced than the current East-West divisional schedules.
Throughout the process, the Big Ten’s scheduling compass pointed toward rivalry preservation. The conversations started with game preference and whittled to the most important series to maintain.
“We asked them to submit any games that they would want considered to be played more frequently than others,” Kenny said. “We didn’t put any guidelines around that; we just left it at that. Tell us what games — whether you want to protect them annually or just play them more frequently — just give us anything that comes to mind for you from your institutional perspective. Then we spent a lot of time once we put that list together with the athletic directors of starting to kind of be transparent, pull that list apart to say, ‘OK, what are the non-negotiable games here, games that need to be played every year either because of common sense in-state, trophy games, etc.’”
Who is playing whom?
There are 11 rivalries now considered permanent, games that will be played on an annual basis: Michigan–Ohio State, Michigan-Michigan State, Minnesota–Wisconsin, Minnesota-Iowa, Wisconsin-Iowa, Nebraska-Iowa, Indiana–Purdue, Illinois-Purdue, Illinois–Northwestern, USC-UCLA and Maryland–Rutgers.
Each team will play three others in both 2024 and 2025. They include:
Illinois: Northwestern, Purdue, Ohio State
Indiana: Purdue, Michigan State, Maryland
Iowa: Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin
Maryland: Rutgers, Indiana, Michigan
Michigan: Ohio State, Michigan State, Maryland
Michigan State: Michigan, Penn State, Indiana
Minnesota: Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska
Nebraska: Iowa, Minnesota, UCLA
Northwestern: Illinois, Ohio State, Purdue
Ohio State: Michigan, Illinois, Northwestern
Penn State: Michigan State, USC, Rutgers
Purdue: Indiana, Illinois, Northwestern
Rutgers: Maryland, Penn State, UCLA
UCLA: USC, Nebraska, Rutgers
USC: Penn State, Wisconsin, UCLA
Wisconsin: Minnesota, Iowa, USC
Opponents that aren’t permanent rivals but will play each other in back-to-back seasons will be referred to as “two-play” opponents. For example, UCLA is a two-play opponent for Nebraska for the first two years of the new schedule. In 2026, all of the non-permanent two-play opponents will rotate. Iowa has three permanent opponents, so it doesn’t have two-play opponents that change. Penn State has no protected rivalries, so all three of its two-plays will change.
“That’s really how those two buckets of teams work,” Kenny said. “The protected opponents are annual, regardless of how long this thing goes. Then those rotational opponents, you’ll play them in two-year increments, home and away, and then in the next two-year increment you get a new team or teams to play home and away.”
Which ‘big games’ take place in 2024?
Outside of the annual rivalry matchups, the highest-profile games will include Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and newcomer USC. The Trojans travel to Penn State and host Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa in Los Angeles. UCLA welcomes Ohio State and Nebraska to the Rose Bowl while traveling to Ann Arbor and Iowa City.
Among the holdovers, Ohio State at Penn State, Wisconsin at Michigan, Michigan State at Penn State, and Ohio State at Michigan State should generate the most interest.
Are there any issues with the model?
The flex model raises the potential for stretches of odd scheduling, in which one team plays at the same site twice consecutively, including during the 2023-to-2024 conversion. With some teams playing three opponents annually and others playing one, the schedules could appear competitively unequal.
Although Iowa plays Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska annually, the league will ensure the Hawkeyes face some combination of Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State and USC each year. Likewise, the Wolverines will see Ohio State and Michigan State every season, but they would avoid an overloaded schedule including Penn State, USC, Wisconsin and Iowa all in the same season.
Why end divisional play?
Kenny said that the league explored both divisional formats and those without divisions. But there were multiple reasons to discard divisions, beyond simply securing more appealing matchups for TV partners and season-ticket holders.
“What quickly became apparent was that the decision to go to no divisions gives you the opportunity to play each other more,” Kenny said. “It gives you the opportunity, if you’re a four-year student athlete at one of our institutions, to play in every single Big Ten venue during your career, which is meaningful.
“And, in this new expanded CFP format, it allows you to really put your best foot forward and have a championship game with your best two teams, based on the conference standings. We’re confident that with a nine-game Big Ten schedule, the winner of that game would be in position to receive one of those first-round byes, and the team competing in that Big Ten championship game would be in a position to host the game on campus. Hopefully, we’d get a couple more teams in position for those at-large bids as well.”
Over the nine years since the conference went to two divisions, the Big Ten East leads the West 90-78 in non-divisional games and has won every championship game. The 2022 season showed the greatest disparity between the divisions, with the East winning 13 of 21 matchups.
Iowa (15-9) and Wisconsin (14-10) are the only West Division teams with winning records in non-divisional play, and the Hawkeyes are the only West team to have beaten every East squad over the last nine seasons. Ohio State (21-2) has the best out-of-division record, followed by Michigan (19-5) and Penn State (17-8). Those are the only five teams with winning records in crossover competition.
This model allows USC, for instance, to play Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State with as much frequency as it plays Illinois or Minnesota. The schedule is equitable with none of the highest-profile teams playing all three of the others in a given season.
What remains undecided?
The opponents now are known, but the schedule itself has not been set. That’s something Kenny expects to finish by the end of December. The model provides flexibility to spread out high-quality games but now the league must work through several logistical changes to finish the game dates.
“It took 171 versions to arrive at the final winner,” Kenny said. “The most difficult part of this process is going to be building and sequencing the schedule with games on dates because we have to work around existing non-conference games. We have to make sure that we’re balancing bye weeks, balancing West Coast travel for the 14 current schools and travel for USC and UCLA in the opposite way.
“We’re definitely benefiting from the fact that 2024 is a 14-week season. So we get that extra bye, to be able to kind of help launch this in the right way. But the process of actually putting this together and also meshing it up with our great media partners is going to be a significant one for this first go-round.”
The Big Ten has embedded rivalries as part of Thanksgiving weekend since the league split into geographic divisions. That’s going to change over the coming years. USC traditionally faces Notre Dame in Los Angeles two days after Thanksgiving in even-numbered years.
While long-standing staples like Ohio State-Michigan and Indiana-Purdue and the now-traditional Iowa-Nebraska Black Friday game will remain on the final weekend, others may shuffle to other weeks. The league previously cycled Michigan State, Penn State, Maryland and Rutgers on Thanksgiving weekend from 2017-19. It also needs to apply extra scrutiny for the regular season’s penultimate week to ensure teams have home and road games over the final two weeks.
“I think a similar approach will be taken here, maybe not necessarily involving those four schools in particular, but just trying to create a way where you make sure that you have inventory for the last week of the season, when a game that maybe hasn’t been there in the past has to be played there,” Kenny said.
Big Ten unveils scheduling model for 2024 and ’25, with up to 3 protected opponents per team
By Scott Dochterman and Nicole Auerbach
The Big Ten unveiled its new scheduling model and matchups for the 2024 and 2025 regular seasons on Thursday, ushering in the new era for a 16-team conference that stretches from coast to coast.
The model, as The Athletic previously reported, is more flexible than the formats peer conferences are using. It is called the Flex Protect Plus, and it gives each Big Ten team up to three protected annual opponents and cycles through all of the teams in the rest of the league. Each Big Ten team will play every other team in the league over a two-year span.
“I think the two-year component is the real important point here, because it allows you to not have to lock things in unnecessarily for longer periods of time,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny told The Athletic. “It’s a 3-6-6 maybe with a twist only because those three aren’t staying rigid the entire time.”
The model is designed to prioritize competitive balance, maintain each school’s most important rivalries and set up the conference for success in the new 12-team College Football Playoff era, which also begins in 2024. There are a total of 11 protected rivalry games each season.
Thursday’s announcement officially ends the Big Ten’s divisional era at the conclusion of 2023, with the final season of the East-West divide coming this fall.
Why did the schools support this model?
Different administrators had different preferences throughout the process, but there were a few important reasons this model gained the support it needed — including the ability to ensure there would never be three 9-0 teams in league play.
First, the flex model preserves the most important rival(s) for each school, a key priority for all. The games that need to be played annually will be played annually. Second, it helps current Big Ten schools avoid scenarios where they’d have to make two separate trips to the West Coast. Keeping USC and UCLA as each other’s only protected annual matchup will help schedule-makers sequence everyone else’s trips to play the L.A. teams in an equitable way. If, for example, Nebraska had been paired with UCLA and required to play at the Rose Bowl every other year, that would have made it harder to fairly cycle USC in and out of the Huskers’ rotation.
Every school still will appear on the schedule of every other Big Ten opponent in a two-year span. So, even for schools with different numbers of protected rivals, the overall schedules stand to be competitively similar. If Team A only plays one team annually, it will play everyone else more frequently than another Team B that plays three annual rivals. Everything will look and feel more balanced than the current East-West divisional schedules.
Throughout the process, the Big Ten’s scheduling compass pointed toward rivalry preservation. The conversations started with game preference and whittled to the most important series to maintain.
“We asked them to submit any games that they would want considered to be played more frequently than others,” Kenny said. “We didn’t put any guidelines around that; we just left it at that. Tell us what games — whether you want to protect them annually or just play them more frequently — just give us anything that comes to mind for you from your institutional perspective. Then we spent a lot of time once we put that list together with the athletic directors of starting to kind of be transparent, pull that list apart to say, ‘OK, what are the non-negotiable games here, games that need to be played every year either because of common sense in-state, trophy games, etc.’”
Who is playing whom?
There are 11 rivalries now considered permanent, games that will be played on an annual basis: Michigan–Ohio State, Michigan-Michigan State, Minnesota–Wisconsin, Minnesota-Iowa, Wisconsin-Iowa, Nebraska-Iowa, Indiana–Purdue, Illinois-Purdue, Illinois–Northwestern, USC-UCLA and Maryland–Rutgers.
Each team will play three others in both 2024 and 2025. They include:
Illinois: Northwestern, Purdue, Ohio State
Indiana: Purdue, Michigan State, Maryland
Iowa: Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin
Maryland: Rutgers, Indiana, Michigan
Michigan: Ohio State, Michigan State, Maryland
Michigan State: Michigan, Penn State, Indiana
Minnesota: Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska
Nebraska: Iowa, Minnesota, UCLA
Northwestern: Illinois, Ohio State, Purdue
Ohio State: Michigan, Illinois, Northwestern
Penn State: Michigan State, USC, Rutgers
Purdue: Indiana, Illinois, Northwestern
Rutgers: Maryland, Penn State, UCLA
UCLA: USC, Nebraska, Rutgers
USC: Penn State, Wisconsin, UCLA
Wisconsin: Minnesota, Iowa, USC
Opponents that aren’t permanent rivals but will play each other in back-to-back seasons will be referred to as “two-play” opponents. For example, UCLA is a two-play opponent for Nebraska for the first two years of the new schedule. In 2026, all of the non-permanent two-play opponents will rotate. Iowa has three permanent opponents, so it doesn’t have two-play opponents that change. Penn State has no protected rivalries, so all three of its two-plays will change.
“That’s really how those two buckets of teams work,” Kenny said. “The protected opponents are annual, regardless of how long this thing goes. Then those rotational opponents, you’ll play them in two-year increments, home and away, and then in the next two-year increment you get a new team or teams to play home and away.”
Which ‘big games’ take place in 2024?
Outside of the annual rivalry matchups, the highest-profile games will include Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and newcomer USC. The Trojans travel to Penn State and host Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa in Los Angeles. UCLA welcomes Ohio State and Nebraska to the Rose Bowl while traveling to Ann Arbor and Iowa City.
Among the holdovers, Ohio State at Penn State, Wisconsin at Michigan, Michigan State at Penn State, and Ohio State at Michigan State should generate the most interest.
Are there any issues with the model?
The flex model raises the potential for stretches of odd scheduling, in which one team plays at the same site twice consecutively, including during the 2023-to-2024 conversion. With some teams playing three opponents annually and others playing one, the schedules could appear competitively unequal.
Although Iowa plays Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska annually, the league will ensure the Hawkeyes face some combination of Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State and USC each year. Likewise, the Wolverines will see Ohio State and Michigan State every season, but they would avoid an overloaded schedule including Penn State, USC, Wisconsin and Iowa all in the same season.
Why end divisional play?
Kenny said that the league explored both divisional formats and those without divisions. But there were multiple reasons to discard divisions, beyond simply securing more appealing matchups for TV partners and season-ticket holders.
“What quickly became apparent was that the decision to go to no divisions gives you the opportunity to play each other more,” Kenny said. “It gives you the opportunity, if you’re a four-year student athlete at one of our institutions, to play in every single Big Ten venue during your career, which is meaningful.
“And, in this new expanded CFP format, it allows you to really put your best foot forward and have a championship game with your best two teams, based on the conference standings. We’re confident that with a nine-game Big Ten schedule, the winner of that game would be in position to receive one of those first-round byes, and the team competing in that Big Ten championship game would be in a position to host the game on campus. Hopefully, we’d get a couple more teams in position for those at-large bids as well.”
Over the nine years since the conference went to two divisions, the Big Ten East leads the West 90-78 in non-divisional games and has won every championship game. The 2022 season showed the greatest disparity between the divisions, with the East winning 13 of 21 matchups.
Iowa (15-9) and Wisconsin (14-10) are the only West Division teams with winning records in non-divisional play, and the Hawkeyes are the only West team to have beaten every East squad over the last nine seasons. Ohio State (21-2) has the best out-of-division record, followed by Michigan (19-5) and Penn State (17-8). Those are the only five teams with winning records in crossover competition.
This model allows USC, for instance, to play Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State with as much frequency as it plays Illinois or Minnesota. The schedule is equitable with none of the highest-profile teams playing all three of the others in a given season.
What remains undecided?
The opponents now are known, but the schedule itself has not been set. That’s something Kenny expects to finish by the end of December. The model provides flexibility to spread out high-quality games but now the league must work through several logistical changes to finish the game dates.
“It took 171 versions to arrive at the final winner,” Kenny said. “The most difficult part of this process is going to be building and sequencing the schedule with games on dates because we have to work around existing non-conference games. We have to make sure that we’re balancing bye weeks, balancing West Coast travel for the 14 current schools and travel for USC and UCLA in the opposite way.
“We’re definitely benefiting from the fact that 2024 is a 14-week season. So we get that extra bye, to be able to kind of help launch this in the right way. But the process of actually putting this together and also meshing it up with our great media partners is going to be a significant one for this first go-round.”
The Big Ten has embedded rivalries as part of Thanksgiving weekend since the league split into geographic divisions. That’s going to change over the coming years. USC traditionally faces Notre Dame in Los Angeles two days after Thanksgiving in even-numbered years.
While long-standing staples like Ohio State-Michigan and Indiana-Purdue and the now-traditional Iowa-Nebraska Black Friday game will remain on the final weekend, others may shuffle to other weeks. The league previously cycled Michigan State, Penn State, Maryland and Rutgers on Thanksgiving weekend from 2017-19. It also needs to apply extra scrutiny for the regular season’s penultimate week to ensure teams have home and road games over the final two weeks.
“I think a similar approach will be taken here, maybe not necessarily involving those four schools in particular, but just trying to create a way where you make sure that you have inventory for the last week of the season, when a game that maybe hasn’t been there in the past has to be played there,” Kenny said.
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This is exactly what we should have done - El Zorro MU - 6/9 12:10:45