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Big Ten Could Set Schedules Based on Previous Year’s Standings Starting in 2028
The Big Ten could change the way it schedules conference games starting in 2028.Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork revealed Thursday that the Big Ten is considering a new football scheduling model in which each season’s conference schedule would be set based on the previous year’s conference standings.
Historically, the Big Ten has set its future conference schedules for years at a time. When USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington joined the Big Ten before the 2024 season, the conference announced its schedules for the next five years. In setting those schedules, the Big Ten looked at each school’s all-time results in football in an effort to balance out the schedules among the conference’s 18 teams. That system, however, fails to account for the rise of teams like Indiana, which has the lowest all-time winning percentage (.424) among Big Ten schools but has emerged as one of the conference’s premier programs over the last three years.
“What they did is they looked at historical records over the course of everyone's football life. So Indiana was not what Indiana is today when they set the model. Same thing with UCLA, right? And so what we're talking about in the Big Ten now is, starting probably in 2028, is can we have a different scheduling model that's based on current year standings?” Bjork said Thursday during his appearance on The Ryan Day Show. “So next year's schedule, we would not know who we're playing (until after this season), other than protecting the rivalry games – obviously we have the biggest one (Ohio State vs. Michigan). Other than that, the rest of the schedule could be based on how did the teams finish in the previous year. That's how the NFL does it.”
Bjork did not specify how exactly that model would work. In the NFL, each team plays the other three teams in their division twice, all four teams from one other division in their conference and one division in the other conference, plus the teams that finished in the same place in the divisional standings from the other two divisions in their conference and one other division in the opposite conference.
With no divisions in the 18-team Big Ten, setting a nine-game conference schedule isn’t as simple – especially when factoring in that each team has a different number of protected rivals, from Penn State having zero to Iowa having three (Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin). It’s also unclear whether the new model would be designed to create as many games as possible between the teams that finished highest in the previous year’s conference standings, or if it would seek to balance out the schedules as equally as possible by ensuring each team plays a certain number of games against teams that finished at the top of the conference, in the middle of the conference and at the bottom of the conference from the previous season.
Either way, Bjork’s comments indicate that the Big Ten has realized it no longer makes sense to set schedules years in advance, which has led to significantly unbalanced schedules in the conference in recent years. For example, Ohio State’s 2026 schedule includes games against all of the other top-six teams in the conference from last season – Indiana, Oregon, USC, Michigan and Iowa – while Iowa, Maryland, Michigan State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin each play only two of the Big Ten’s top six teams from 2025.
The new model would come as the Big Ten also prepares to implement a requirement for each of its teams to play at least one Power 4 non-conference game with the College Football Playoff set to expand to 24 teams next season. Adding that to the increase in parity in college football that’s come with NIL and the transfer portal, Bjork believes the Big Ten’s scheduling model needs to change, though he expects the 2027 schedule to remain in place.
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