Over the weekend, Scott Dochterman of The Athletic predicted the Big Ten’s 2025 College Football Friday Night schedule. One Ohio State game appeared on the list: At Illinois on Oct. 10.
The Big Ten wants to put a game on every Friday of football season. Here’s an attempt to project which 2025 games could make the move.
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Predicting the Big Ten’s 2025 Friday football schedule: Which games will move off Saturdays?
In its first season as an 18-school conference, the Big Ten shifted nine games to Friday nights. This fall, the league is looking to place games on every Friday of the regular season, starting on Aug. 29 and concluding on Black Friday.
But deciding which games should shift from Saturday to Friday is hardly simple. It’s a delicate balancing act for the league, its three media partners and the universities. Each school has on-campus concerns the conference must consider before moving a home game off of Saturday. A sampling:
- Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and Iowa have allowances to avoid Friday home football games. Iowa’s massive hospital complex is located across the street from Kinnick Stadium, which prevents it from hosting a Friday game except on Labor Day weekend or Black Friday. With stadiums seating more than 100,000 fans, stresses on community services have kept Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State off the Friday grid. Michigan also will not play Friday games on the road.
- Schools must grant approval if the league wants to schedule either a second home or second away game on a Friday, for health and recovery reasons as well as competitive balance.
- The league wants to avoid situations of lopsided schedule difficulty like what happened last fall to Michigan State, which hosted Ohio State on a Saturday, then traveled to Oregon the next Friday.
- Homecoming remains a major event for the longtime Big Ten campuses, which often locks in those kickoffs to Saturday afternoon.
Then there’s the league’s trio of media partners: Fox, CBS and NBC. Outside of Thanksgiving weekend, the Big Ten’s Friday kickoffs appear on the Fox family of networks (Fox, FS1, BTN). But the league doesn’t want to move an upper-level game that NBC or CBS might want to draft for its showcase Saturday broadcast.
“In our mind, we’re looking for maybe the fourth-, fifth- or sixth-best game of the week to try and make sure that at least on paper, going into a season, the top three games are going to be available for selection by those three broadcast partners,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny told
The Athletic last year.
With those variables in mind, filling out a Friday night schedule is akin to completing a football sudoku puzzle. In attempting one myself, nearly a dozen versions went into the fireplace. I’d reach the season’s final week, and somehow a team ended up with a second home Friday game or a significant competitive disadvantage. Eventually, one made it through with the principles intact.
The Big Ten’s final version — last year’s Friday schedule was set in May at the league’s spring meetings — might not look anything like this, but here’s an attempt to project which Big Ten games could shift to Friday (and other days) and why, starting on Labor Day weekend.
Oct. 10: Ohio State at Illinois
This choice might invite double-takes. Both teams enter the season CFP contenders, which typically would vault this into Fox’s noon window. So why is it here? This week’s slate has two West Coast games Fox cannot air in that time slot: Michigan at USC and Indiana at Oregon. Iowa at Wisconsin would fit in perfectly on Friday night, but it’s one of three homecoming games throughout the Big Ten. So, Fox could maximize its choices by drafting the 104th edition of Ohio State-Illinois into Friday prime time and then air the 99th installment of the Iowa-Wisconsin rivalry on Big Noon. Ohio State-Illinois would have the potential to set a Friday ratings record for Fox; last year’s high was 4.21 million viewers for Illinois-Nebraska.
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