What Could the 10th B1G Football Game Look Like For 2020?

Following this afternoon’s announcement that the B1G is cancelling non-conference games this fall due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, things were immediately thrown into flux.

While we don’t know anything at this time (like if we’re even getting football games this fall, which we aren’t), we do know that the easiest way to make this schedule work a bit better would be to add a 10th game by creating an extra crossover game to be played in the West stadia.

But how would that work?

I tried hammering things out using two simple goals:

1) Line up opponents straight across the 2019 standings.

This is simple. Open Excel, put everyone in order of finish, and voila! You’ve got matchups.

2) No back-to-back matchups.

No trips to the same West stadium that you visited last season. This...makes things a little trickier. So let’s start by throwing together the 2019 final standings like so...

Easy enough, right?

Well, there’s a problem here with Rule #1 in that you can’t have Indiana-Illinois because the 2020 schedule already has Illinois-Indiana.

And as for Rule #2? Penn State, you’re going to be causing all sorts of problems here.

But in addition to that, Maryland travelled to West Lafayette last October for that unforgettable 40-14 heartbreaking last-second loss.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s lock everyone else in. We’ve now got Ohio State going to wisconsin, Michigan traveling to Iowa City, Nebraska hosting Sparty, and the most 2020 game possible in Rutgers trekking to the Litter Box to play Northwestern.

That leaves us Minnesota, Illinois, and Purdue for Penn State, Indiana, and Maryland, and I’m going to work this out as easily as possible here:

Purdue plays Indiana every season and hosted Maryland last year. That just leaves Penn State. Is #2 vs. #6 fair? Not really, but there’s not much else we can do. Penn State played at #2 Minnesota and #3 Iowa last year and plays #5 Nebraska and #7 Northwestern this year. Face it, PSU. You’re screwing everything up.

So now we’ve got Minnesota and Illinois for Indiana and Maryland.

Since Indiana already plays the Illini this year, just slot them up against Maryland and send Indiana to Minneapolis and this is a nice, easy(ish) clean schedule.

Is it perfect? No. But it’s a reasonably straight-forward approach to getting 10th games for the 2020 season. Not that any of it matters, because we’re not getting college football anyway.