Big Ten schools will dive into a pot of gold coins again. ![]() When the conference soon announces a new media deal with several partners, led by Fox, it will bake in the value of having USC and UCLA onboard. The Big Ten has stayed narrowly ahead of the SEC in the TV-cash arms race, but it was poised to fall a bit behind. The SEC made itself too big to fail and secured a lot of years of enormous media-rights payments. In realignment, you are a poacher or an elephant. (The leagues’ detente probably ended when the Big Ten speared the Pac-12 in the neck on Thursday.) But it is impossible to accurately describe the Big Ten’s wheeling and dealing as anything but a countermeasure. It pursued similar messaging when it co-founded “The Alliance” with the Pac-12 and ACC last August, a few months after the SEC raided the Big 12’s pantry for Oklahoma and Texas. The Big Ten will avoid saying that it is responding to the SEC. programs will start in the Big Ten in 2024.) Jon Wilner, the Pac-12 Hotline reporter who broke the news, was among several who suggested the Big Ten’s shopping spree might not stop now that it has matched the SEC at 16 schools. But they are all minnows compared to what the league announced on Thursday, when it reached into Los Angeles for two crown jewels of Western college sports and added USC and UCLA to the Big Ten. (I refuse to call them “ the AAC’s” Rutgers.) Those additions shored up the Big Ten in some valuable TV markets, albeit not much in football competitiveness. The Big Ten has been ruthless about securing that bag, starting with its westward expansion to grab the Big 12’s Nebraska in 2011 and its eastward move for the ACC’s Maryland and Big East’s Rutgers in 2014. That has been the Big Ten, which lacks the SEC’s easy recruiting footprint but has other assets-bigger population centers and some enormous alumni bases-that have brought it even more television money. The conference’s next big challenge is setting actual game dates, which are expected to be released later this year.The SEC has not, however, been the historic richest conference in college sports. UCLA has been designated as USC’s only rival, while Iowa has three and Michigan, Minnesota and Purdue each have two.īig Ten officials said they examined 262 models before deciding on the newly released schedule, which boasts no repeat matchups in the same location and ensures that every team will play each other at least twice over the five years. Officials made the decision to “protect” 12 rivalries, meaning that those matchups will be played every season. The protected opponents feature was another main concern for the Big Ten, as the conference struggled to balance historic rivalries with the introduction of new teams into the conference. To design the lineup, the Big Ten debuted a new Flex Protect XVIII model, which “features a combination of protected opponents and rotating opponents for universities.” “The reality is we’re still going to play half of our games and, in most years, a little over half of our games on the West Coast, so I don’t think we’re going to be hurting for it here.”īalancing travel by distance, region and time zones was a primary consideration for the Big Ten during schedule development, according to the conference’s website. “I honestly felt like from the West Coast piece, I think they did what they needed to do,” USC Head Coach Lincoln Riley said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. USC’s 2024 away games will now feature conference matchups against Washington, UCLA, Minnesota, Michigan and Maryland - a total expected air travel distance of roughly 14,406 miles for the Trojans who were previously scheduled to play Northwestern, Purdue, UCLA, Maryland and Penn State. ![]() USC will host Nebraska, Penn State, Rutgers and Wisconsin at home in 2024 - an almost entirely new schedule compared to the June lineup which featured Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. The conference will be composed of a total of 18 schools, who will each play nine interconference games per season. The update made changes to a schedule previously released in June, which had to be revised in August after Washington and Oregon announced that they would also be joining the Big Ten in 2024 alongside USC and UCLA. On Thursday, the Big Ten announced a new opponent lineup for the next five seasons, starting with USC’s first year in the conference in 2024.
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