The Big Ten football season is going to look different in 2024.
New additions USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington bring more formidable opponents to the table. But more importantly, gone is the East-West Division model, replaced by a format of conference standings similar to that in basketball.
There are some blockbuster out-of-conference games to monitor before the conference slate begins this fall. Wisconsin hosts Alabama, USC faces LSU and Michigan meets Texas. Then begins the conference schedule, which is filled with big-time matchups every weekend.
So far this offseason we’ve already ranked all 18 programs in the Big Ten, ranked the 18 head coaches, predicted each Big Ten team’s 2024 record and checked in on the Las Vegas win totals for each team in the conference.
Now it’s time to take a look at each team’s 2024 conference schedule:
So, to rank each program’s 2024 Big Ten schedule as we preview the 2024 season we’ve taken each team’s ESPN SP+ rating and found numerical values for every game, and therefore every schedule.
The equation is simple. Every opponent’s SP+ rating is added together to find a Total Opponent Score. That large number is then divided by the nine conference games to find the Average Opponent Score — a number that can then be compared to the SP+ leaderboard to find the average quality of team each schedule contains.
Here is how each program’s 2024 Big Ten Conference schedule ranks, from easiest to most challenging:
Contact/Follow @TheBadgersWire on X (formerly Twitter), and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Wisconsin Badgers news, notes, and opinion. Follow Ben Kenney on X.