College Football

Big Ten schedule will give fans what they want: All the best matchups

Published Jun. 14, 2023 10:23 a.m. ET

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RJ Young

FOX Sports National College Football Analyst

On a Thursday afternoon in June, the Big Ten put on its big boy breeches and, bigun, the league brass revealed 2024 and 2025 conference slates as hearty and delicious as a 12-high stack of pancakes, six slices of bacon, two large bananas, two glasses of whole milk, a cup of coffee and a bib to catch what you don’t finish.

The new Big Ten at Big Noon? That’s a balanced breakfast over there, bigun. You better loosen your belt because you’re gonna need the storage.

The conference brass isn't protecting any brand but the fan. It recognized what makes this sport go is the millions of Americans who want to see good-on-good, blueblood-on-blueblood, rip-roaring rushing, and aerial attacks worthy of the air raid siren.

This is how a super-conference is supposed to schedule. While the SEC has its members ducking each other, the Big Ten has its members playing each other at least once every other year, with matchups as delicious as thick-cut bacon on Texas toast.

With the Flex Protect Plus Framework — which feels like a line of products the late great Billy Mays would've pitched to me in an infomercial as I came down from the high of late night and flinty Pac-12 football — you can see the conference is keenly interested in not just protecting existing rivalries but in getting its most popular and widely compelling programs to tilt a lance — a lot.

The B1G dropped divisions. It kept the rivalries that matter: Ohio State-Michigan, Michigan-Michigan State and Maryland-Rutgers. (You're meant to laugh here.)

For the most part, each program will have three permanent opponents. Some have just one, and some are Penn State, which has none.

Everybody is gonna get their turn to run the Midwest Mordor Corridor, though.

In 2024, Michigan, an OG in the B1G, will play at Ohio State, at USC and perhaps give UCLA the coldest welcome to the Midwest at the Big House. This is in addition to playing Fresno State, Arkansas State and Texas out of conference.

Meanwhile, USC, an infant in the conference but a Made Man in the sport, has inadvertently put together a schedule that's about as soft as a two-ton hammer dropped on a rotting wood floor.

[Key games to get excited for in 2023 season]

In 2024, USC's schedule dance doubles as a four-month-long Kumite: LSU in Las Vegas, Notre Dame, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, at Maryland, at Northwestern, at Penn State, at Purdue and at UCLA. Now the order laid out here will change, but the difficulty is stuck at All-Madden.

The same is true for one of the last members to join last time we had a bit of realignment around the home office in Chicago.

As I wrote in our roundtable last month, Nebraska needs Matt Rhule to get a move on, and he has yet to coach a game as Huskers head coach — let alone in the Big Ten yet.

The program, once one of the most feared in the sport through the last decades of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st, hasn't played in a conference title game since 2012 — a 70-31 defeat to Wisconsin when the B1G debuted its Leaders and Legends divisions. That was also the last year that Nebraska won 10 games.

Husker fans have also watched Purdue and Northwestern (twice) play for a conference title in two of the last three years as West Division winners.

For a program that hasn't strung together a winning season since 2016, the imminent entry of USC and UCLA could mean more of the same in perpetuity if Rhule doesn't get the Huskers bowl-eligible in 2023.

Now, in a year when many expect to see Rhule cutting through the Big Ten like an International Harvester in a bumper crop year, they're staring down a 2025 schedule that would ashen the face of an SEC program with equal parts wonder and dread.

The Huskers get to play at Maryland, at Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Rutgers, UCLA, at Ohio State and at USC all in 2025. And those are all after Nebraska opens with Akron, at Cincinnati and Maryland.

Murderer's Row is a term that originally referred to a set of adjoining jail cells at New York's Halls of Justice, AKA "The Tombs," that predate the Civil War and certainly the Big Ten. The phrase was first put into circulation in November of 1852 by the New York Herald Tribune: "In the Tombs where the doomed criminals are secured under the immediate care of Mr. Peter Crosby, one of the efficient keepers of that establishment, one range of cells, adjoining each other, have been appropriated for murder cases, designated the ‘Murderer’s Row.’" 

The 1927 New York Yankees made the phrase famous. Now, you could assign it not just to USC's 2024 schedule and Nebraska's 2025 schedule, but to doggone near all the Big Ten's future scheduling.

The Big Ten hopes that's true, too, because behind this delicious Flex Protect Plus is a subtle acknowledgment that strength of schedule will play a role in who gets selected to the 12-team playoff.

If the SEC is gonna lean on its reputation — defined not as what you're gonna do but what you've done in the past — then the Big Ten is not only gonna give people the games they want to see most inside their league, but point the finger at the soft-handed, weak-handshake model they're using in the South.

No sport is more resistant to change or more conservative in its approach to progress than college football and its head coaches. Add athletic directors and even most fans to this.

The SEC will welcome the inclusion of Oklahoma and Texas by not doing a damn thing to make their league more exciting. Rather than moving to the nine-game conference schedule that the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 are employing, the SEC is sticking with an eight-game model. That means we might go several years without seeing some of the league's most popular brands circle up in the moonlight for a Saturday night fistfight.

Instead, the SEC looks like a conference just smart enough to request a fake ID and ask for a receipt.

As I wrote last week, the SEC's model is less about what is good for the SEC and its legion of fanatics and more about protecting the crappy half of the league in position to get to 6-6 or 5-7 with a tidy APR score — I’m nose-to-nose with you, Vanderbilt.

I think the format will eventually change to one where SEC teams play nine league games, but not before postseason eligibility changes completely with the implementation of the 12-team playoff. If you think SEC shot-callers look like a bunch of fellas who bought their champion belt buckles and an antique six-shooter at a pawn shop and shot themselves square in the foot, just know they hit right where they were aiming.

Meanwhile, the B1G engineered a schedule that resembles Dodge City and steps its members out in the streets like Doc Holiday asking to be your huckleberry.

Somebody hand me a fork. I’m ready to eat.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The Number One College Football Show." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young and subscribe to "The Number One College Football Show" on YouTube.

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