The New Big Ten Schedule: Winners, Losers, and Whiners

Well, as of last Friday, we have a Big Ten football schedule!

Don’t have a Big Ten volleyball or soccer or any other schedule, but I’m sure that’s a bug and not a feature of all this.

Biggest Winners

Jesse Collins: OSU and Big Ten payouts. There’s very little reason to think they aren’t a playoff team seeing this schedule.

WhiteSpeedReceiver: Northwestern has Maryland and @MSU as crosssovers? If they were any good that’d be a great schedule.

87townie: Purdue has a great schedule. They have three tough games in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The rest of the games are winnable – Illinois, Northwestern, Rutger, Nebraska and Indiana. And pulling rutger and Indiana as crossovers is just awesome. This should be a solid season for the Boilers.

Minnesota gets a test first game vs Michigan (I’ll be a wearing maroon for that game). After that everything is winnable until they go to Wisconsin. That will be a tough one and it will probably determine the West champ.

Stewmonkey13: OSU, because there’s football. But Iowa does lose OSU from the schedule, so we get another year of 55-24, people forget that.

Thumpasaurus: All of us. The Big Ten listened to all the true college football fans and had no choice but to cave in to the pressure put on them to preserve ILLINUTGERS.

ZuzuRU: Hmmm if Nebraska thinks they got punished for bad behavior, this Rutgers schedule suggests we’ve been rewarded for being one of the more level-headed programs.

MNW: Illinois/Purdue as your crossovers is about as good as you’ll get. Rutgers HAS to be a winner in the crossover department.

In the West, wisconsin gets a Charmin-y introduction to the season, with three should-wins—two of which are at home—while Iowa gets a manageable road game at Purdue and then hosts two underperforming squads from 2019 back-to-back. The land-rich, money-poor farmers of the West should keep on trucking.

In the East, there’s no one who jumps out at me as having it particularly easy off the bat, though I suppose outside their Week 2 trip to Happy Valley, Ohio State—surprise, surprise!—did get off easy.

My winners, more broadly, are Ohio State and whiners everywhere. Congrats, guys.

Biggest Losers

Jesse: Non-Wisconsin West teams. We know that going into this year but thats not a bad schedule...

WSR: Iowa’s the only team with rational aspirations in the West that has back-to-back games against good opponents (@MN @PSU), although wisconsin’s MN-IU-@IA run could get interesting.

87townie: Illinois could rack up a single win this season (rutger). I don’t see more than that. They could be dogs in every other game this season.

Stew: Like WSR points out the order of games doesn’t favor Iowa, not like it’ll matter all much because holy fuck look at wisconsin’s cakewalk. Also lol UNL.

Thump: Our original schedule opened with roughly our six easiest games. lol we start at Wisconsin. I actually wanted to see if we could hang with Indiana as opposed to confirming that we are not as good as Ohio State.

Candystripes: I mean, Indiana continues to play in the East, so 4 of our hardest games were already guaranteed to happen anyway. And then we catch Wisconsin right before Bucket Week, so, you know, 2-7 isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Maybe we’ll catch a break and get to 4-4, though.

MNW: You can’t be a loser if you got exactly what you asked for. You can, however, be a loser on the field—my best to the Huskers.

Candy has already noted it—that’s a brutal schedule for an Indiana club with a lot of reasons to be optimistic in 2020! Penn State and Michigan at home, Michigan State and Ohio State on the road, a breather with Turkey Day Terps...but man. Ouch.

Friendliest/Unfriendliest Crossovers?

Jesse: OSU had the good draw and Neb has a rough draw but that’s how it got drawn up a while ago.

WSR: Who gets Rutgers and Nebraska?

87townie: Ohio State gets the Illini and the Corn Huskers? Nice job bagmen!

Stew: Ohio State got UNL and Illinois as crossovers? Let’s just pave the way for them. Also, jNW got Maryland and MSU, but they’re also bound to lose some dumb game so...

Thump: Much to Andrew’s delight, there’s no escaping Northwestern for MSU.

Andrew: I’m not stuck in MSU00N with you.

YOU’RE STUCK IN MSU00N WITH ME.

MNW: Yeah, I noted it earlier, but that Rutgers crossover is about as good as it gets outside drawing Northwestern. In the West, though, it’s gotta go to Northwestern. Escape the Big Three, draw a rebuilding Michigan State. Not bad.

Anything else you’ve noticed?

Jesse: Funny: the idea that we are getting any of this finished...

WSR: It’s Minnesota’s original schedule without Indiana. It is what it is.

87townie: Nebraska needs a better bagman. Pulling PSU and OSU as your crossovers sucks hard.

Stew: There’s 56 games in this regular season schedule, think if we get about half that many games and I’ll be surprised.

MNW: I noticed/learned just how terrible the Nebraska media is. My goodness, the amount of water McKeown and Sipple carry for that program:

It’s been discussed ad nauseam everywhere else, so there’s no sense in doing the usual “not all Nebraska fans” dance. But it’s incredible to see the amount of taint-sucking that passes for journalism in Huskers land. I’d be disgusted to print that horseshit here, and we’re an amateur collection of sportsblogyellers.

As WSR noted, this schedule is literally just a reworked original schedule for the Huskers. They lost their bye, dropped non-conference games against CMU, SDSU, and Cincinnati, and gave up the road trip to Rutgers because the chips gotta fall somewhere.

Get fucked, Sipple, and get fucked, Nebraska sports journalism.

CornNation, you’re cool.

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