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?]

Would they do it? I've had some word that it's been passed along, but I'm not holding my breath. Dochterman is an Iowa guy with access to Gary Barta, and asked him about it.

“You can debate whether or not the championship game is better or worse, but we haven’t had any serious discussions about eliminating it,” Barta said. “First of all, we just got it going. It’s been selling out. It has financial ramifications if we were to decide that. But we haven’t had strong, serious conversations about that.”

That statement reeks of conservatism, but rank cowards is what we're dealing with. These are the kinds of guys who need to experience a disaster before they react to the potential for one. If 10-2 Ohio State that just got trounced in Columbus wins a close, controversial victory over 11-1 Michigan a week later that knocks Michigan off the Playoff host line, AND there's a huge backlash, they're probably still not going to care because that game will get a ton of viewership and pack the building. The Wisconsin-Nebraska game in 2012 (when PSU and OSU were disallowed) was the only time in the B10CG's history there was any significant momentum to fix it, and even then they went with imbalanced divisions.

There's also a question of motivations. Iowa is one of the more likely schools to sneak into a championship game with an 8-4 record and pull off an upset, but that's also most of the Big Ten. This creates a problem similar to the one that's ruined the college hockey postseason where the majority of teams' best shot at winning a championship is to increase entropy. It's one thing for us to talk about producing a better champion, and quite another to convince the dozen or so Big Ten schools that aren't likely to be 12-0 at the end of November to erase their best shot at hardware.

PROTECTED RIVALRIES?

There will be. The problem is rivalry relationships are as convoluted as a third grader explaining class besties.

School	Main Rival	2nd Rival	3rd Rival
Illinois	Northwestern	What's an Illibuck? We hate Michigan.
Indiana	Purdue
Iowa	Minnesota	Wisconsin	Nebraska
Maryland	Penn State	Rutgers
Michigan	Ohio State	Michigan State	Minnesota
Michigan State	Michigan
Minnesota	Wisconsin	Iowa
Nebraska	[Oklahoma]	[Colorado]	Iowa
Northwestern	Illinois
Ohio State	Michigan	Penn State	Illinois
Penn State	WE DON'T HAVE ANY! (is what we say to make Pitt mad)
Purdue	Indiana	Illinois
Rutgers	Penn State	Maryland
UCLA	USC	[Cal]
USC	UCLA	[Notre Dame]
Wisconsin	Minnesota	Iowa

I used gray for the rivalries that aren't strictly necessary, and added brackets to out-of-conference ones. For our purposes, Ohio State and Michigan State are safe. Via Scott Dochterman of The Athletic($), there are three proposals on the table right now:

• Protect 3: Three permanent rivalries, presumably as fair as possible.
• Protect 2: Two permanent rivals.
• Flex: One to three permanent rivals.

Let's discuss each in turn.

The Protect 3 situation is favored by ADs and schedule nerds, because the math works out smoothly with a 16-team conference. With nine-game conference schedules this leaves each team free to play exactly half of the remaining teams in the league, IE you get a home and home with every other conference team every 4 years. This is just a hastily made example of how that might shake out:

School	Rival	Rival	Rival
Illinois	Northwestern	Purdue	Ohio State
Indiana	Purdue	Nebraska	Northwestern
Iowa	Nebraska	Wisconsin	Minnesota
Maryland	Penn State	Ohio State	Rutgers
Michigan	Ohio State	Minnesota	Michigan State
Michigan State	UCLA	Northwestern	Michigan
Minnesota	Wisconsin	Michigan	Iowa
Nebraska	Iowa	Indiana	UCLA
Northwestern	Illinois	Michigan State	Indiana
Ohio State	Michigan	Maryland	Illinois
Penn State	Maryland	Rutgers	USC
Purdue	Indiana	Illinois	Wisconsin
Rutgers	USC	Penn State	Maryland
UCLA	Michigan State	USC	Nebraska
USC	Rutgers	UCLA	Penn State
Wisconsin	Minnesota	Iowa	Purdue

As you can see, this system is a lot dirtier in practice than in theory, creating plenty of odd bedfellows (in gray), and despite my efforts to make sure nobody's locked in with two of Michigan/OSU/USC, plenty of competitive imbalance (compare the path of Rutgers to that of Northwestern).

The Protect 2 is a simplicity's sake compromise that would break up a few rivalries, and create a few more odd couplings with schools that don't really have a second bae. It also creates a little bit of imbalance, because each Big Ten team would be playing two of their non-rivals in an extra two games. Sample schedule:

School	Rival	Rival		1/2 Rivals
Illinois	Northwestern	Ohio State		Indiana, Wisconsin
Indiana	Purdue	Rutgers		Illinois, Nebraska
Iowa	Nebraska	Wisconsin		USC, Minnesota
Maryland	Rutgers	Penn State		UCLA, Michigan State
Michigan	Ohio State	Michigan State		Minnesota, USC
Michigan State	UCLA	Michigan		Northwestern, Maryland
Minnesota	Wisconsin	Nebraska		Michigan, Iowa
Nebraska	Iowa	Minnesota		Wisconsin, Indiana
Northwestern	Illinois	Purdue		Michigan State, UCLA
Ohio State	Michigan	Illinois		Purdue, Penn State
Penn State	USC	Maryland		Rutgers, Ohio State
Purdue	Indiana	Northwestern		Ohio State, Rutgers
Rutgers	Maryland	Indiana		Penn State, Purdue
UCLA	Michigan State	USC		Maryland, Northwestern
USC	Penn State	UCLA		Iowa, Michigan
Wisconsin	Minnesota	Iowa		Nebraska, Illinois

They can balance this better than the above (look at Purdue!!!) but competitive balance is working against the goals of the TV execs who want to get USC-Ohio State and USC-Michigan happening as soon as possible.

Finally there's a Flex model on the table. The upshot is you can make every school happy, if that school knows what it wants. This also maximizes flexibility, which is at a premium as they try to schedule around competitive imbalances, or try not to make a team fly out to California more than once per year. It's also a headache in practice, and invites all kinds of input that they don't necessarily want.

I don't know if there is a "best" but I also don't think the parameters we'd use to define that are necessarily what the stakeholders want. The web of wants is tangled indeed:

• TV Execs are the Big Ten's most important constituency. They want the biggest games: Michigan-Ohio State, USC-Michigan, USC-Ohio State, Ohio State-Penn State, USC-Penn State, Michigan-Penn State, Michigan-Ohio State again in the championship, and then Michigan-Ohio State a third time for the tiebreaker.
• ADs want three or more protected rivalries because they can lock in their most lucrative opponents, and they can know schedules well in advance. If you're in charge of Iowa's budget, you don't want to lose any of Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Nebraska, ever.
• Coaches favor more diversity in scheduling, because that expands their footprints. As soon as they heard about USC and UCLA they pulled up a list of SoCal players they could promise a couple of home games before their families. There are also a few coaches—not publicly because it gets the fans upset—fighting their ADs to get out of tertiary rivalries, or create easier schedules.
• Some lesser programs want the bigs. Rutgers wants Penn State every year, and would love to lock in Michigan and Ohio State if they could. Those games sell a lot of tickets, and every game is a potential upset that can fuel you for years to come.
• Bigger programs want the smalls. Michigan might go for the Rutgers deal because getting locked in with Ohio State/Penn State/USC would be a hellishly hard road to the championship. Wisconsin led the call for regional divisions because they benefited from the competitive imbalance. Last round MSU told the Big Ten they have a deep connection with Northwestern.
• Haters want tougher schedules for their rivals. If you're not trying to find a competition angle, you're not playing the game. Michigan and Ohio State are probably both pointing at each other as the perfect pairing for 2024-'25 USC, and non-M/OSU teams are pointing at the only programs to win a conference title since 2015 for a little "fairness" correction.
• School administrators & ADs want travel minimized. A modern athlete can handle two trips to the West Coast, but it's up to the schools to cover the travel costs, and those add up quickly. And funny as it may sound, there is a real desire among these particular decision-makers to at least look like they care about pulling students out of class or exhausting them on red-eyes. USC and UCLA have no choice, but no Eastern Time Zone team is going to play both of them on the road the same year.

Nobody there really cares what the fans want, but that's also because a lot of "what fans want" is just another term for what the speaker wants. In general fans care about playing the big rival and playing other schools in their proximity. Of course they also live all over the place, so "in my proximity" could mean Northwestern or Rutgers or UCLA or anything. Also fans want crazy things sometimes. I ran a Twitter poll yesterday, which isn't at all scientific (my followers lean historical and nerdy), but confirmed my guess that we are so far from a consensus that it ended with a literal tie:

Also 1 in 5 of my respondents wanted Penn State, without consideration for how that would play in schedule difficulty. A lot of "Other" was Northwestern (Twitter only allows 4 answers) because like the rest of the Big Ten we have a lot of grads in northern Chicago.

Worryingly, there's a lot of talk from [the reporters with the most access to] some schools about Michigan not having a Power-5 nonconference opponent in 2022 or 2023, and none that mention Michigan has Texas and Oklahoma series scheduled for the four years this round of scheduling will cover. One of those talking was Dochterman in the afore-linked article, who hammered the point with no mention of the upcoming behemoths or the cancelation of UCLA. If their mouthpieces are voicing it on Day 1, you know this is a talking point inside the meetings, which means they're trying to convince themselves locking Michigan in with USC is somehow fair.

At the same time they're telling Brett McMurphy that the league is considering rescinding its Power 5 nonconference requirement set to go into effect in 2024.

So Michigan should be punished for playing UConn and ECU instead of UCLA, but now that the rest of us have to play UCLA we shouldn't have to schedule other teams like them. Also Michigan should still have to play USC and Oklahoma and Texas, and my alumni will kill me if we don't get Northwestern and Rutgers every year. The takeaway should be that the schools are mostly there to get the best deal for themselves.

WHY DID YOU SAY THE MSU GAME IS SAFE?

Note that none of the scenarios above are "Keep 1" which is is the *only* scenario in which Michigan State gets left out. State has as many votes here as Michigan, and would raise maximum hell if denied their one actual rivalry.

On the Michigan side, MSU is a schedule anchor that allows them to charge more than all but a few schools for season tickets on even years. I've been tracking the ticket market for years. The way Michigan prices their season tickets is when you add up the license fee and and all of the face values it equals the price of the same tickets on the secondary market. For appearances, they hide that by listing the face value of smaller games well above their market value, and put "$100" or some such on the MSU or OSU tickets. In reality you're paying ~$250 to $300 for that ticket, which is what those tickets cap out at on the secondary market. A PSU ticket, for comparison, can usually be had for $100 any day before the game. Would USC command enough to make up that $17 million difference? Probably that first time. But from Michigan's perspective why take on another OSU-caliber opponent when your fans (and MSU's) will pay that for MSU?

The one-sided movement towards making MSU just another game—and this includes a handful of regents—barely existed until last year's tunnel incident. I get it, because instead of enjoying a physical, emasculating, comprehensive blowout that included Sean McDonough spinning "trouble with the snap" back on them, thinking about that game all year just makes me angry. In the seven months since, how much of the discourse has been gaslighting over tunnel size, skipping, and Washtenaw County's prosecutor, versus remembering a guy did this?:

They are internet trolls the program, and "Why feed the trolls" is a valid question. Unfortunately Michigan's answer is the same as social media sites that do everything they can to counter their users' content curation: If it makes you angry, you engage. MSU stays.

HOW LONG WILL THIS SCHEDULE LAST?

For now they're only focused on a four-year plan, IE from 2024 to 2027. It probably won't even last that long, because the latest round of expansion has destabilized the ACC, and they have some properties the Big Ten and SEC would both be interested in adding. Note that any school they add would have to bring in more than the current Big Ten mean which Washington and Oregon did not. Ross Dellinger on that:

To expand again, more broadcasting dollars (at least $200 million a year) were needed to assure that school distribution remained whole. The most likely broadcasting dollars would come from ESPN or streamers Amazon and Apple. Neither happened.

“It was ‘Show me the money!’ and there wasn’t any money,” says one Big Ten administrator.

Based on 2021 revenues, the non-SEC/B10 teams that could make sense are Notre Dame (obviously), FSU, Miami (YTM) and Clemson. Virginia and UNC are in the ballpark, and the latter brings along Duke, the only school with a basketball value approaching that of a medium football school's.

It's too hard to guess how things will all work out with any kind of accuracy, but I do not believe the landscape can remain what it looks like now for more than four or five years. The ACC is falling apart as we speak, with the football schools demanding things the other schools would never go for, while also examining their exit strategies. Pac and Big12 remnants are trying to figure out what their next move is after losing their respective anchor programs, with the Pac10Again in deeper trouble because of the state of their media rights deal. Further out, it's only a matter of time, whether by courts, labor movement, or some conference jumping in on competitive grounds, before players are signed to contracts with some kind of TV revenue-sharing, which is why all of this realignment is happening now.

We're already historically overdue for another top division breakaway, and that process has likely been accelerated by the B12/ACC/Pac remnants, since those conferences need to lock in their major statuses before a ConfUSA or AAC shows they're competitively equal. Best guess is by 2030 there's a new top division of ~60 teams broken into thirds between the Big Ten, SEC, and some Pac/B12/ACC leftovers. The latest talk suggests FSU, Miami, and Notre Dame to the Big Ten; and Clemson, Virginia, UNC, and Duke to the SEC. It all sounds insane, but the oceans are battlefields.