Nine months before their conference kicked off as an 18-team structure with games airing on three major networks, Big Ten officials sifted through more than five dozen possibilities before settling on the 63rd iteration as the league’s schedule for the 2024 football season.
With a season’s worth of data, analysis and feedback now complete, Big Ten leaders more than doubled their diligence in compiling the 2025 football slate. Commissioner Tony Petitti, chief operating officer Kerry Kenny and vice president of football administration A.J. Edds shuffled through twice as many schedules before settling on No. 130 in late November.
“We sat in a conference room for about three hours, and we went team by team, week by week, and said, ‘All right, what do we like about this?’” Kenny told The Athletic. “What do we think needs to be tweaked? And if it needs to be tweaked, what’s the impact downstream on some of the other schools that might be impacted by it?”
The version that was unveiled Wednesday afternoon met the league’s parameters related to competitive balance and travel while creating compelling matchups throughout each of the season’s 14 weeks.
“In the second year, we just had the benefit of more data to be able to make more decisions on the margins that helped, in our mind, push things towards a little bit more balance across all 18 schools,” Kenny said.
Big-game placement
Whether they admit it or not, all league officials monitor their rival conferences’ approaches and adjust accordingly. ABC’s Week 5 broadcast of Georgia at Alabama generated nearly 12 million viewers and set the sport’s tone for much of the season. The Big Ten chose a similar strategy in 2025 by scheduling Oregon at Penn State on Sept. 27 in a conference championship game rematch.
“We like that early just to help drive interest early in the season,” said Kenny, who oversees football scheduling. “It just helps the conference be able to position meaningful games early and to drive a little bit more interest and storylines as you get deeper into the season.”
Other top games were placed strategically. Although it’s no longer an annual series, Penn State–Ohio State traditionally takes place near the Big Ten season’s midpoint; 2025’s will kick off in Columbus on Nov. 1. The league scheduled the Michigan–Michigan State rivalry for Oct. 25.
“That first week of November, late October timeframe has worked really well because it still gives those teams the chance to build a little bit of a narrative,” Kenny said. “But even if a team loses, as we saw with Penn State losing to Ohio State in that same weekend this year, it gives them a chance to still make a statement the rest of November to make a push for the postseason, as opposed to that game being something that’s going to be truly definitive in terms of keeping somebody out of the postseason.”
Then in the season’s penultimate week, USC visits Oregon, as the former Pac-12 rivals for the first time as Big Ten foes.
“We like that USC-Oregon game in the second-to-last week of the season,” Kenny said. “It’s just a chance for a really important West Coast game that’s driven a lot of interest in in the Pac-12 in the past.”
Spreading out the powerhouses
Each team will have two open dates over the season’s 14 weeks, and three different weeks will feature only six games. With four primary time slots to fill on three linear networks, the Big Ten’s media partners will occasionally have to navigate a diluted slate. That forces the league to place its traditional ratings drivers in key weeks.
“I think you have to rely a little bit on the historical competitiveness of certain brands to help make sure that you have an anchor game every week,” Kenny said. “Maybe that’s a Michigan, a USC, or Ohio State, Penn State. But you also have to maybe look for pockets where this might be a game that, based on how teams kind of ebb and flow historically and more recently, you take a chance on placing it in a window where maybe it does drive a little bit more interest.”
Penn State, Ohio State and USC share an off week on Oct. 25, but to prevent a drop-off in interest or ratings, the Big Ten scheduled annual rivalry games Michigan-Michigan State and Iowa–Minnesota alongside Wisconsin–Oregon in Eugene, Ore. This year, the top-ranked Ducks suffered their biggest conference play scare in Madison, escaping with a 16-13 win.
On Sept. 20, the Buckeyes and Nittany Lions are idle during a week when Big Ten and nonconference games overlap. But three nonconference rivalries — Oregon-Oregon State, Washington–Washington State and Purdue–Notre Dame — join high-profile matchups like Michigan at Nebraska and Michigan State at USC with Illinois at Indiana to fill up the week.
“Hopefully we find some games like Indiana-Ohio State, that ended up being a real marquee game in Week 13 for us this year,” Kenny said. “We don’t know what that game is going to be, but as long as you have enough depth in each of the weeks, and you have enough of those anchor games at the top of the lineup each week, you can take some swings and hopefully find a little bit more success than what it looks like on paper now some nine months before the schedule is actually played.”
Solving for taxing travel
Officials tried their best to lessen the travel grind as much as possible in the coast-to-coast Big Ten. Every time one of the four West Coast programs travels to the Eastern or Central time zone for a conference game, they will play at home or receive an open date the next week. The league also did the same thing for USC following its nonconference game at Notre Dame.
Of the 14 universities located in the Eastern or Central time zones, 13 were given a home game or an open date the week after a trip to the West Coast. The exception is Minnesota, which plays at Oregon on Nov. 15 and follows that up with a trip to Wrigley Field for a game against Northwestern on Nov. 22. But the Gophers have a nonconference game at Cal on Sept. 13 and are idle the following week.
“It never was going to be perfect, but we felt on balance, that getting a bye after one of those road trips for Minnesota was going to be important,” Kenny said.
The league also chose to keep travel as light as possible around Thanksgiving. All four West Coast teams will stay in the Pacific time zone for their final two games, while only two games in the penultimate week (Michigan State at Iowa, Nebraska at Penn State) cross time zones.
Some observers may have wanted the West Coast teams to play late-November games in potentially frigid Midwest and Northeast locales, but league officials chose a different route.
“The minute that you go down that path, then you also have to have Eastern and Central time zone schools making trips to the West Coast,” Kenny said. “Those long-haul trips come at a time of year when they don’t need any more tread on the tire wearing off because of what the season has already been, and certainly what they’re preparing for in the postseason, whether it’s bowl games or the CFP.”
Television
Not everyone was thrilled with the Big Ten’s television package, which included a noon ET kickoff on Fox, a 3:30 p.m. game on CBS and a prime-time start on NBC. Ohio State, for instance, appeared six times on Fox’s Big Noon package, including five of the last six games. Penn State traditionally saves its “White Out” for its biggest home night game, but with Fox picking first on several weeks, multiple key Penn State games aired at noon, including the showdown with Ohio State.
It wasn’t always Fox’s fault, Kenny said. The network used its top choice on Ohio State four times, but it chose the Buckeyes’ game as the second or third pick in the lineup two other weeks. Games on the West Coast cannot air in the noon ET window, which limits Fox’s noon inventory.
“It’s going to be tough just given the three-network setup, from a broadcast perspective, for a network to pass on an Ohio State game that’s sitting there for them if it falls to the second or third pick in a week,” Kenny said.
Fox, which owns 61 percent of Big Ten Network, can shift one game to the mid-afternoon over the course of the season, so the network is not completely boxed out from airing West Coast games. It also can flip spots during the two weeks when NBC broadcasts its Notre Dame home games in prime time.
For Fox’s Friday night package, the Big Ten identifies multiple games that could appear in that window before choosing one for each week. Most of the league’s schools can appear in up to one home game and one road game on Fridays each year, although four schools have logistical issues that prevent them from hosting on that night. With Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State in high demand, it’s doubtful the league will schedule any of those three on Friday night.
“It is a tougher balancing act with the CBS and NBC piece, because they paid for the right to have the best three games available, along with Fox on Saturdays,” Kenny said. “It’s very rare that a Penn State or Ohio State game is not going to be in the mix for a top three unless it’s just a massive week where you’d have enough depth with USC or Oregon or other teams involved to really give CBS and NBC the feeling that they’re getting what they paid for.”
Two games will appear on Black Friday, including Iowa at Nebraska. The other game has not been determined. Along with Minnesota, Northwestern will play Michigan at Wrigley Field, and the Gophers’ season opener against Buffalo will kick off on Thursday, Aug. 28.
Quirks and adjustments
Each school has its quibbles with the schedule, but Wisconsin ended up with a slate no one will envy. The Badgers’ October slate includes a trip to Michigan, home dates with Iowa and Ohio State and then a flight to Oregon. Kenny conceded that “maybe it’s the most difficult stretch for any school in the conference.”
“The Wisconsin one was really tricky. We spent a lot of time on that one,” Kenny said.
Wisconsin’s Week 3 game at Alabama created challenges in how league officials built the overall schedule. They wanted to put some distance between the Badgers’ trip to Tuscaloosa and their high-profile Big Ten opponents.
“We looked at a lot of versions that had the Michigan game or the Ohio State game immediately after that Alabama trip,” Kenny said. “We didn’t feel like that was a great way for them to start off conference play by having a road game there and then potentially a road game at Ann Arbor, or even a home game against Ohio State immediately coming out of that Alabama game.”
Indiana plays only one home game in November, with three road trips and an idle week. By design, both the Hoosiers and Purdue are idle the week before their season finale. Before their open date, the Boilermakers travel to Washington while Indiana plays host to Wisconsin.
“We wanted to make sure that we gave (Purdue) an opportunity to catch their breath for a big rivalry game against a CFP team from this year,” Kenny said. “So that that led to Indiana’s available opportunities for home games in November to shrink as a result of that.”
There were plenty of ideas that were scrapped during the scheduling process. One version included Rutgers and Penn State taking off the season’s penultimate week and then playing on Black Friday in Piscataway, N.J. But the residual impact on the entire schedule was too much, and the version with Nebraska at Penn State was chosen instead.
“Those are some of the things that we try and play around with and why you end up getting 130 versions,” Kenny said.
(Photo: Dylan Buell / Getty Images)
