Big Ten unveils new football sked model for 2024
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Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior Writer
The Big Ten in 2024 will introduce a football schedule model that includes 11 protected matchups across the conference, eliminates divisions and targets a robust overall rotation as the league expands to 16 members with USC and UCLA.
The “Flex Protect Plus” model maintains a nine-game league schedule and contains both guaranteed annual matchups and rotating ones. Beginning in 2024, every conference pairing will take place at least twice in a four-year span, once at each member school’s home stadium.
The list of annual protected matchups, which features historic rivalries and trophy games, varies in number among Big Ten teams.
The protected games are: Michigan–Ohio State, UCLA-USC, Minnesota–Wisconsin, Indiana–Purdue, Michigan State-Michigan, Iowa-Minnesota, Illinois–Northwestern, Iowa-Nebraska, Maryland–Rutgers, Iowa-Wisconsin and Illinois-Purdue. The Big Ten on Thursday announced all opponents for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, although specific dates will be finalized later.
Teams also will have opponents they play in both 2024 and 2025 — called “two-plays” — that will change for the 2026-27 cycle. For example, USC and Penn State will play in both seasons, as will UCLA and Nebraska.
Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny told ESPN that overall flexibility became the biggest priority with the schedule model, which generated about a year of discussion. The conference considered models that included no protected annual games, or 1-3 protected games per school, before deciding that a varied approach could preserve the most important pairings and create the best rotation so players could compete in every stadium. According to Kenny, the Big Ten reviewed 171 versions within the Flex Protect Plus model.
“It’s done in two-year increments, so that allows you to be a little bit more responsive to competitive trends, responsive to changes in the postseason model,” Kenny said. “Look, we don’t know how the CFP committee is going to evaluate teams in this expanded playoff, but we’re pretty darn sure that this model that we’re putting forward and the depth of the games and the quality of games, that’s going to send a pretty strong and significant message.”
The division-less model will feature the top two teams competing in the Big Ten championship game. Tiebreaker specifics will be announced at a later date. Since the Big Ten implemented the East and West divisions in 2014, the East division winner has won every conference title.
Kenny said that although divisions had advantages, they also limited the frequency of compelling matchups. Under the current division model, Indiana-Purdue is the only protected annual cross-division matchup. Kenny said the Nebraska-Michigan series, in which Michigan visited Nebraska in 2012 but did not go back until 2021, often came up in discussions.
“That’s a nine-year gap for two historically competitive, some of the winningest programs in the history of the sport, and Michigan fans and Nebraska fans only got to experience that game in Lincoln twice since Nebraska joined the league,” he said. “So competitive is important and postseason access and TV, but it comes down to asking the question: ‘What makes us a conference? What makes us feel like we’re really tied together in a meaningful way?’
“Playing each other more and not less has some impact.”
When examining different schedule models, the Big Ten asked its schools to list the most important matchups — historic rivalries, regional games, trophy games — they would want protected annually in a nondivision format. The schools then were asked about their “nonnegotiables,” Kenny said, as well as games they would like to play frequently but not annually.
Iowa, which first played both Minnesota and Wisconsin in the late 1890s, preserved both games, along with Nebraska, a regional series that has been played the day after Thanksgiving since Nebraska joined the Big Ten.
Penn State, meanwhile, has zero annual protected opponents in the new model. The Penn State-Ohio State game has often shaped the league and CFP races, but it will not be played in 2025 after taking place at Beaver Stadium in 2024.
“The more protected matchups you’ve included in the model, the less flexibility you had to create a really balanced model for everybody,” Kenny said. “So 11 was where we capped it. Penn State doesn’t have any protected matchups, but they see more teams three out of four years, the way that the model will be built moving forward, that might be a little more geographic to them.”
USC’s initial Big Ten schedule in 2024 will feature Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin at home, and Maryland, Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue and UCLA on the road. UCLA’s first Big Ten slate has Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Ohio State and USC at home, and Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Rutgers on the road.
Both newcomers will play every Big Ten school at least once by the end of the 2025 season, and every existing Big Ten team will play at either UCLA or USC during the same span. Kenny said increased travel and a third time zone factored into the 2024 and 2025 opponents, as did avoiding repeat sites from the 2023 schedule and maintaining the alternating five-four split — five league home games one year, four league home games the next.
“We needed to make sure that we did a good job of balancing not having really extreme travel distances for them, of one school having to go to their five furthest possible opponents in Year 1,” Kenny said. “You have to balance Eastern time zone schools, Central time zone schools.”
Michigan’s 2024 trip to USC will mark its first since 1958. USC will visit Penn State for the first time since 1994.
UCLA will visit Michigan Stadium for the first time since 1996 and will host Ohio State for the first time since 2001.
The Big Ten first introduced divisions in 2011, when Nebraska joined the league as its 12th member. The initial divisions, named Legends and Leaders, were formed to achieve competitive balance based on team performance data. Certain annual rivalries were sacrificed, including Wisconsin-Iowa.
But the division names drew widespread mockery, and the league scrapped them in 2013 and then went with the geographic designations, which began when Maryland and Rutgers entered the league in 2014.
Former Heisman Trophy winner Eddie George was named the next head coach at Bowling Green on Sunday.
George agreed to a five-year deal, sources told ESPN.
His hiring came two days after George, who spent the past four seasons as the head coach at Tennessee State, was one of three finalists to interview for the position.
“Today, we add another transformative leader to this campus in Eddie George,” Derek van der Merwe, Bowling Green’s vice president for athletics strategy, said in a news release. “Our students are getting someone who has chased success in sports, art, business, and leadership. As our head football coach, he will pursue excellence in all aspects of competition in the arena. More importantly, beyond the arena, he will exemplify what excellence looks like in the classroom, in life, in business, and in relationships with people.”
George emerged as a successful head coach in the FCS at Tennessee State. This past season, he led the program to the FCS playoffs and a share of the OVC-Big South title, the school’s first league title in football since 1999.
“I am truly excited to be the head coach at Bowling Green State University,” George said in the news release. “Bowling Green is a wonderful community that has embraced the school and the athletics department. We are eager to immerse ourselves in the community and help build this program to the greatness it deserves. I am overwhelmed with excitement and joy for the possibilities this opportunity holds.”
George returns to the state where he rushed for 3,768 yards over four seasons as a running back for Ohio State, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1995.
George went on to star in the NFL for nine seasons, rushing for more than 10,000 yards. He was a 1996 first-round pick of the Houston Oilers and made his name by playing seven seasons in Nashville for the Titans, becoming the franchise’s all-time leading rusher. The Titans retired his jersey in 2019.
Tennessee State hired George despite his lack of traditional coaching experience, with the school president at the time calling the move “the right choice and investment” for the future of TSU. George has worked as an actor and entrepreneur and earned an MBA from Northwestern.
George paid back the administration’s faith by building Tennessee State into a winner, including a 9-4 season in 2024 that culminated in its first FCS playoff appearance since 2013. Tennessee State lost to Montana in the first round.
George’s hire at TSU continued the trend of former star players being hired at historically Black colleges and universities. Jackson State made the biggest splash in hiring Deion Sanders, who went on to a successful stint at Colorado. Michael Vick’s hire at Norfolk State and DeSean Jackson’s hire at Delaware State continued that trend in the current hiring cycle.
George will replace Scot Loeffler, who left the school to become the quarterbacks coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Bowling Green has become one of the top coaching springboards of this generation, with Urban Meyer, Dave Clawson and Dino Babers all advancing from the school to power conference jobs. Loeffler went 27-41 over six seasons, a run that included bowl appearances in each of the past three seasons.
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Eli Lederman
Defensive end prospect Richard Wesley, one of the nation’s top recruits in the 2027 high school class, has reclassified into the 2026 cycle and will sign with a college program later this year, he told ESPN on Friday.
A 6-foot-5, 245-pound pass rusher from Chatsworth, California, Wesley completed his sophomore season at Sierra Canyon (California) High School this past fall. His move marks the latest high-profile reclassification in the current cycle, following wide receiver Ethan “Boobie” Feaster (No. 21 in the ESPN Junior 300), tight end Mark Bowman (No. 23), running back Ezavier Crowell (No. 29) and cornerback Havon Finney Jr. (not ranked) in the line of the elite former 2027 prospects to reclassify into the 2026 class since the start of the new year.
ESPN has not yet released its prospect rankings for the 2027 class, but Wesley is expected to slot in among the nation’s top five defensive line recruits in 2026. He took unofficial visits to Oregon and Texas A&M in January and holds a long list of offers across the SEC, Big Ten and ACC.
Following his reclassification, Wesley told ESPN he will take trips to Ohio State, Georgia, Texas, Miami, Oregon, USC, Ole Miss and Texas A&M across March and April before finalizing a slate of official visits for later this spring.
“I really can’t say what the future holds for me,” Wesley said. “I’m excited for more opportunities to go talk with these coaches and see what they’re about. I’m really open to everyone that’s offered me and who really wants me in their program.”
Wesley emerged as one of the nation’s most coveted high school defenders after he totaled 55 tackles and 10 sacks in his freshman season at Sierra Canyon in 2023. He followed this past fall 44 tackles (16 for loss) with nine sacks and four forced fumbles as a sophomore.
The rash of reclassifications into the 2026 class comes after a series of top prospects opted to reclassify during the 2025 recruiting cycle, headlined by five-star recruits Julian Lewis (Colorado) and Jahkeem Stewart (USC) and Texas A&M quarterback signee Brady Hart. Wesley told ESPN that his decision to enter college early was motivated by conversations with college coaches and his belief that he will be physically ready to compete at the next level by the time his junior season ends later this year.
“All the colleges I talk to have shown me their recruiting boards and told me I’m at the top of their list at the position regardless of class,” Wesley said. “They’ve told me good things and they’ve told me the things I need to work on. I need to work on my violence. I’ve been grinding at that every single day.”
Wesley now joins a talented 2026 defensive end class that features 11 prospects ranked inside the top 100 in the ESPN Junior 300.
Five-star edge rusher Zion Elee, ESPN’s No. 1 defender in the class, has been committed to Maryland since this past December and closed his recruitment last month. JaReylan McCoy, a five-star prospect who decommitted from LSU in February, and four-stars Jake Kreul (No. 19 overall) and Nolan Wilson (No. 54 overall) stand among the cycle’s top uncommitted defensive ends.
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