RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — When the Big Ten shifted to nine conference games in 2016, former commissioner Jim Delany demanded his football teams also schedule an additional game against a power-conference opponent.
The Big Ten used its strength of schedule as a moral high ground as it pushed for recognition from the College Football Playoff selection committee. Despite the SEC and ACC scheduling eight league contests and most of their teams playing only nine power-conference opponents, the Big Ten’s scheduling philosophy rarely earned the benefit of the doubt when it came to the CFP rankings. So, the league abandoned it as an official policy.
This fall, the SEC and ACC both shift to nine league games with every team in those leagues playing at least 10 power-conference opponents. Every Big 12 team plays 10, too, if the matchups with Pac-12 leftovers Washington State and Oregon State are counted. The Big Ten is now the outlier in this debate, with four teams — Indiana, Penn State, USC and Nebraska — facing only nine Power 4 opponents. And there’s no interest from the league office to require its teams to play 10 power opponents.
“We’re happy to help assist and promote and direct where possible, but after we got away from that 10th game, we have not jumped back into the deep end of bringing that back at this time,” said A.J. Edds, the Big Ten’s vice president of football administration. “There’s some that do it, there’s some that have not, and therefore we’re not in the position of moving right back into it right now.”
Big Ten teams have won the last three CFP titles, and each champion played only nine Power 4 opponents during the regular season. For Michigan (2023) and Ohio State (2024), those schedules were outliers. For Indiana (2025), it was a choice made by coach Curt Cignetti. Penn State has a two-year scheduling blip but returns to 10 Power 4 opponents in 2027 when it plays Syracuse. USC’s inability to reach a deal with rival Notre Dame prompted its scheduling issue, while Nebraska dropped a series with Tennessee.
Cignetti hinted he might adjust in the future after dropping games against Louisville and Virginia upon his arrival in 2024.
“One day, when the dust settles, you’ll see a lot of changes in college football, and you’ll see conferences with some cross-scheduling and stuff like that,” Cignetti said. “I think you’ll see a lot of changes in the next five years.”
The Big Ten formerly shifted conference games to the season’s opening week in 2017, 2021 and 2022, but it doesn’t plan to revisit that strategy anytime soon, Edds said.
“If we have two programs that are of the opinion that getting together early in the season serves purposes for them in the way they’re organizing their nonconference, then we’ll give that a good, hard look every time,” Edds said.
Late-January football ‘doesn’t make sense’
Big Ten football coaches publicly supported commissioner Tony Petitti’s 24-team CFP proposal, but if there was one topic that united them even more, it was pushing up the football calendar.
This year, the CFP title game takes place Jan. 25, 2027, in Las Vegas. For the coaches, that’s way too late, especially with the transfer portal opening on Jan. 2 and winter classes underway weeks before the championship. Nobody was more outspoken about changing the calendar than Ohio State coach Ryan Day.
“I feel very strongly about that,” Day said. “To let the season go all the way into the third or fourth week of January doesn’t make sense. So, the sooner we can get the season over with, the better, so that we can get into putting our next year’s roster together and bringing in our freshmen, because that all happens the first week of January.
“Can we be finished by the first week of January? I think that would be ideal, or even sooner if possible.”
If the 24-team CFP is approved for the 2027 season, the first round most likely would start Dec. 3-4, and the second round would kick off Dec. 10-11. The quarterfinal round would depend on the NFL schedule, either taking place the weekend of Dec. 17-18 or perhaps shifting to midweek on Tuesday and Wednesday, Dec. 22-23. The semifinals could then air Jan. 1, with the championship played a week to 10 days later.
Private equity
Multiple athletic directors told The Athletic they haven’t seriously discussed outside equity deals since the league and UC Investments put their $2.4 billion agreement on hiatus last fall. Michigan and USC were against the deal, which would have infused each program with between $100 million and $190 million. But it also would have prompted an extension of the league’s grant of rights through 2046.
Michigan’s Board of Trustees vehemently opposed it. Among the Big Ten’s public universities, Michigan has by far the largest university endowment ($21.2 billion) and athletic endowment ($278 million). Without a University of Michigan president in place, there’s no chance the league could swing that opposition in its favor.
“I’ve learned in life to never say ‘never’ to anything, but right now, it’s not what I think is in our best interest at Michigan,” athletic director Warde Manuel said. “Until we think about it differently, or circumstances change, we feel at Michigan (that) we’re in a different position and don’t need that for us or in the league right now.
“I have many people close to me, many Michigan alums who do great things for the world through private equity, so it’s not something that I’m against totally. But I don’t feel it’s the right thing for us to do right now.”
Manuel added that Michigan “is happy being a part of the Big Ten.”
Watching their SEC colleagues
Big Ten officials will monitor the SEC meetings this week to see how that league discusses the 24-team College Football Playoff plan. Petitti’s proposal to double the CFP field has support from the ACC and Big 12, but many inside the SEC — including commissioner Greg Sankey — are skeptical. The Big Ten and SEC must agree for any CFP proposal to come to fruition.
Rutgers athletic director Keli Zinn, who was LSU’s deputy athletic director a year ago, signaled there could be more support than has been publicly revealed.
“I also believe a number of them are already there,” Zinn said. “As we try and kind of figure this thing out collectively, you see that a number of folks feel the same way that we do.”
Flex weekend fizzles
Should college football approve a 24-team CFP format, the Big Ten will eliminate its championship game. But don’t count on the league to manufacture a final weekend with flexible matchups to replace it, as the Pac-12 is doing this fall. In four of the last five years, Michigan-Ohio State was the highest-rated regular-season game. Other conference rivalry games also take place that weekend.
“Why would we change it?” Petitti asked. “I’m not sure what we could ever do that would beat the performance that Ohio State-Michigan has on the last weekend.
“I understand there might be a football reason. … I don’t want to break some things that are going great, that’s for sure.”
Cignetti’s smile
Nobody was happier to leave the Big Ten meetings at the Terranea Resort than Cignetti. He conducted an interview Tuesday morning with the Big Ten Network, sat with two other reporters for 10 minutes and then flashed a monster-sized smile once he hit the elevator. A car was waiting outside the lobby to whisk him away to the airport.
“He does not waste any time,” Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson said. “That’s why it’s tough for him to be at these meetings. He’d rather be preparing for next season, watching film, doing all the work that he does.
“I went into his office last July on a Sunday, and he’s watching red-zone plays, like 900 of them, categorizing them on a Sunday in July, when nobody’s around, and that’s because he loves it.”
