How I Would Schedule a 20 Team Big Ten
I kind of hate this all, but in looking for some silver lining, I came up with this idea for how to schedule a 20 Team B1G in football. Basic idea is four 5 team pods. Each year you get your 9 games by playing the other 4 in your pod plus all 5 from a different pod. Championship game is the best record from each set of paired pods since they'll have identical schedules.
The part I'm most exited about is creating two pods that consist of the 50s - 80s version of the Big Ten. To make this work, I picked Oregon, Washington, Duke, and UNC as the last 4 in.
East: Penn State, Rutgers, Maryland, Duke, UNC
Central: Michigan, MSU, OSU, Indiana, Purdue
North, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Northwestern
West: UCLA, USC, Oregon, Washington, Nebraska
Oregon is not a take. Would love to have their athletic department in the B1G (and B1G games in closer proximity to my beloved home), but they are not an academic fit.
Ok, say there are four divisions of 5 teams each.
For scheduling
1) Out of Conference game
2) Division Game (rotate home and away)
3) Division Game
4) Division Game
5) Division Game
6) Cross over Division Game (Rotate each cross over every 2 years 1-home/1-away)
7) Cross over Division Game
8) Cross over Division Game
9) Cross over Division Game
10) Cross over Division Game
Game #11
Big Ten Playoffs. Winner of each Division plays at a neutral site. Say that Division 1 played Division 2 for their cross over game. Division 1 champion would play Division 3 champion and Division 2 champion would play Division 4 champion.
The remaining non-playoff teams would play each other #2 in Division 1 vs #5 in Division #3, #3 in Division 1 versus #4 in Division #3. This would be a 2 year cycle as well with a home and home. One year Division 1 is home, year two Division 3 is at home.
Game #12
The Division winners would play for the Big Ten Championship. The losers would play each other.
This time #2 in Division 1 would play #5 in Division 4. Again a two-year cycle means 1 home and 1 away. You would probably alternate so that game 11 is starting at home and game 12 on the road to give everyone the most home games.
This does away with yearly rivalry games but would give schools a good look at the other schools.
I would change Purdue with NW.
PSU would ALMOST always win....not too fair to the others, despite what Duke and NC have done vs lesser competition. (It's called BIG 10 football for a reason) and I don't know if DUKE/NC can handle it week-in and week-out. JMO.
In my system at least, PSU would likely be the best of the east, but they'd always be paired with another pod for a division in a given year. So one year they're dealing with USC and Oregon, one year they have UM and OSU, and one year they have Wisconsin and Iowa.
One thing that's not going to happen is a full 12-game, all in-conference schedule. To do that would mean a 6 home, 6 away game schedule. No school is going to give up the extra two home games you get with 3 non conference opponents.