schedule

A butterfly flaps its wings in Indiana. [Marc-Grégor Campredon]

THIS IS ALL TEMPORARY

The ACC is crumbling, the Pac 12 may not exist anymore, and Oregon and Washington are blowing up Brett McMurphy's cell phone on a weekly basis to say they heard a rumor that UCLA said they saw USC talking to the AAU about Miami and FSU at 31 flavors, and they think it's pretty serious. As Sam Webb iterated and reiterated on the show this morning, they're just putting this together right now as a stopgap because they're not done expanding.

THE SCHEDULE

Mitch Sherman helpfully got us a screen shot. White games are on the road; gray at home.

image

[Discussion after THE JUMP]

Now for a game of keepaway. [Bryan Fuller]

The conference is meeting this week to figure out its 2024+ scheduling. It seems they're already leaning towards doing away with divisions, and now only need to decide how to protect rivalries. So let's discuss the different ways they might do things, what's best for fans, the conference, and Michigan.

DIVISIONS?

Seem to be a dead letter. The result of the February meeting established two core tenets for their scheduling, in order:

  1. Do whatever we can to get teams in the (12-team) College Football Playoff.
  2. Every four-year player should get to play on every B10 campus at least once.

This was well-received, and means they are almost certainly heading towards a divisionless system with a championship game. Removing divisions effectually takes Big Ten teams from their current six protected rivalries to between one and three, freeing up those games to see the rest of their conference opponents.

CHAMPIONSHIP GAME? SHOWCASE?!?!

Now would be a good time to implement my alternate conference Plus-one plan. To reiterate, the most basic version of the plan is you play the top three conference games that weren't played and determine the champion by final record. Benefits:

  1. It's two more good games to broadcast.
  2. A clearer and more deserving conference champion.
  3. No chance of replaying Michigan-Ohio State a week after The Game.

When I presented the plan I ran through every year since 2008, and most of the time the Showcase 1 game was the de facto conference championship and matched the same two teams who played. Without divisions they're also probably stuck playing these at neutral sites, which I don't like, but is probably more palatable to the conference.

[After THE JUMP: What the rivalries would look like, what's the future?]

[Bryan Fuller]

The Big Ten finally released its retooled schedule for next year. Here's the whole conference (click to big):

schedule

via Big Ten

And here's ours vs the old one:

Date NEW WAS
September 2 East Carolina East Carolina
September 9 UNLV UNLV
September 16 Bowling Green Bowling Green
September 23 Rutgers at Minnesota
September 30 at Nebraska Bye
October 7 at Minnesota  (at) Michigan State
October 14 Indiana  at Nebraska
October 21 at Michigan State  Purdue
October 28 Bye at Maryland
November 4 Purdue at Penn State
November 11 at Penn State Rutgers
November 18 at Maryland (vs) Indiana
November 25 Ohio State Ohio State

Note that on the old-old schedule MSU was at home and IU on the road, as this was announced before they fixed the home-road deal in 2020. For months before Michigan took the old schedule down I was getting board posts from people who thought they were going back to MSU being at home the same years as OSU.

Discuss. Not much to. Michigan's game at Penn State got pushed back a week while Ohio State gets home games against MSU and Minnesota in the weeks before The Game. MSU got their bye week moved up to two weeks before Michigan, with Rutgers in the way. Michigan's bye got moved to late October, the week after MSU. Getting Rutgers at the top of the year and the late-November version of Maryland is nice.

The opening week Big Ten games are Nebraska at Minnesota (Thursday night), IU-OSU, and Rutgers-Northwestern.

[After the JUMP: weak? why?]