Ross Bjork says Big Ten eyes standings-based schedules

For Indiana people, this is personal. Their side has been yelling for a while that the league's schedule is stuck in the past.

Colin McMahon

@ColinMcMahon31

This makes a ton of sense. The current conference schedules were made when Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State were regarded as the top three teams in the league. That's created terribly unbalanced schedules based on the current strength of those programs. #iufb's 2027 slate is a perfect example.

Dan Hope

@Dan_Hope

Now appearing on The Ryan Day Show, Ross Bjork says the Big Ten is having conversations about changing the football scheduling model in 2028 to be based on previous year’s standings. With that, conference schedules would not be set years in advance (other than the Michigan game).

That's the core complaint, and it holds up. The Big Ten set its opponents and protected rivalries for the 2024-28 seasons in one long cycle, and it built that rotation around the old pecking order. In that world Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State were the top 3 and everybody else lined up behind them. If the league has changed since then, a schedule locked in years ago has no way to change with it. A team that's turned into a heavyweight can end up with a cushy slate, and a team that's slipped can still get treated like a blue blood.

Here's what Bjork described. The Big Ten would stop setting conference schedules years ahead of time. Each season's matchups would come from where teams finished the year before. Rivalry games like The Game stay locked in, and everything around them would move with the standings. The idea also lines up with commissioner Tony Petitti's goal of making the schedule more competitive now that the league has 18 teams. The NFL uses a version of this, where finishing 1st gets you a tougher draw against other 1st-place teams.

It also matters that this came from Bjork, on his own head coach's radio show. Ohio State is the program a fixed rotation was supposed to protect, so its AD floating the change says the talks are real. For now it's only talks: nothing has been voted on, and 2028 is the first season mentioned. People in other leagues heard it and started making the same case for their own conference.

Jon Grove

@jongrove02

If the Big Ten can get this done, there’s absolutely no excuse for the Big 12 not to do the same.

Dan Hope

@Dan_Hope

Now appearing on The Ryan Day Show, Ross Bjork says the Big Ten is having conversations about changing the football scheduling model in 2028 to be based on previous year’s standings. With that, conference schedules would not be set years in advance (other than the Michigan game).

That's the right question to ask. The Big 12 has been a mess of parity, and plenty of fans think a fixed rotation there has handed out lucky and unlucky slates. If the biggest league in the sport can schedule by merit and still keep its rivalries, the other conferences lose their best excuse not to try it.

There's plenty still to work out. Do the 1st-place teams play each other? How many games move each year? How does a TV partner plan 2 years ahead when it doesn't know the matchups? And does anyone at Michigan or Penn State want a schedule that could get tougher overnight? Even so, the AD of the league's biggest brand said out loud that the conference is talking about scheduling teams by how good they are now, not how good they used to be. Indiana fans have wanted to hear that for a long time.