Big Ten football schedule analysis: Behind Black Friday selections, Week 1-3 choices

With four West Coast programs joining the Big Ten this fall, it’s a new era for the league — and its viewing platforms.

The 2024 season is the second year the Big Ten will operate with the trio of Fox, NBC and CBS, but it’s the first time CBS will showcase an entire campaign of Big Ten football. With the league also airing 15 games on Friday nights in 12 of the 14 weeks, plus offering Saturday prime-time kickoffs throughout the season, this is far from the same conference that once shied away from all but a handful of night starts and viewed 3:30 p.m. ET as the golden time slot.

“The complexity of this puzzle, it’s unprecedented at our level,” said Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny, who handles football scheduling. “When you think about 18 schools, four network partners, three time zones, just the stuff that goes into creating this, it’s really mind-numbing in some ways.”

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Every move is strategic and impacts the entire schedule beyond a singular week. From the Rutgers-Howard season opener shifting from Friday to Thursday to the nation’s most-played major rivalry in Wisconsin-Minnesota kicking off Black Friday, the Big Ten’s viewing slate is interesting and holistic. The league and its network partners announced times and viewing options for the first three weeks of games, plus specialty times (yes, homecoming still matters) and dates. All other remaining games fall under the six-to-12-day selection process.

Here’s a look at 10 Big Ten topics following the schedule release (all times Eastern).

Opening weekend alterations

This fall is the final time the Big 12 will air a game in Fox’s Big Noon window which will become exclusively Big Ten property in 2025. This year, it couldn’t have worked out better for any party.

Fox elected to draft Penn State at West Virginia, which fills its Big 12 obligation and airs a major Big Ten brand in the time slot. In turn, Fox received a Big Ten midday game for the only time during the season (UTEP at Nebraska) and also will air North Carolina at Minnesota on the opening Thursday. NBC previously announced Fresno State at Michigan as its opening-week selection, while CBS grabbed ratings monster Ohio State for its debut against Akron.

“When we negotiated our deals, we weren’t sure when Oklahoma and Texas were actually going to transition from the Big 12 to the SEC,” Kenny said. “To give Fox the opportunity to potentially select a Big 12 game at noon at some point during the season, we needed to have a mechanism in there where for one week, we were OK with Fox putting a game out at 3:30 or at some other time.

“So with week one, it was a really opportune moment for them to activate it.”

Initially, the Big Ten wanted to air a Sunday prime-time game on NBC but with the network’s coverage of the Paralympic Games, coupled with the USC–LSU kickoff on ABC, that option instead will debut in 2025. There will be two additional Thursday night games (Eastern Illinois at Illinois, Howard at Rutgers) while Weber State at Washington will be BTN’s first foray into Saturday after-dark territory (11 p.m. Eastern). There are two Friday night matchups (Florida Atlantic at Michigan State, Western Michigan at Wisconsin) on Labor Day weekend.

Friday night lights

The Big Ten will play 15 games on Fridays this fall, avoiding just the third and 10th weekends. Last week, Fox announced nine Friday prime-time kickoffs. Thursday, the league released its pair of Black Friday offerings and four other games appearing on FS1 and BTN.

As complex as the scheduling matrix can be, the Big Ten aided its road Friday competitors with a travel reprieve. None of the road teams travel the week prior, so the short week schedule won’t drastically impact their teams. In addition, all three non-West Coast teams flying to the Pacific time zone are off the following week.

In upcoming years, the Big Ten plans to play on every Friday of the season.

“(Fox) looked at their Friday package — they had the WWE there for a long time — but they made a decision to pivot and lean into what they view as their second-most successful property in college football,” Kenny said. “Other than the World Series games that may be there in the future, we really look at that as a college football opportunity there.”

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World Series after midnight

On Oct. 26 following Game 1 of the World Series, Rutgers and USC will kick off at the Memorial Coliseum at 11 p.m. Eastern.

The Big Ten justifies the unusual kickoff time in multiple ways. Rutgers plays at home against UCLA the previous week, while USC travels to Maryland. The Scarlet Knights have a bye the following week, which means the long flight afterward will impact the players less health-wise and competitively.  The late kickoff provides a few extra hours of recovery for USC players after their cross-country flight.

“(The World Series is) a fixed position on Fox broadcast, so there wasn’t going to be any way to go earlier,” Kenny said. “The way that we projected things out with Fox, I think they liked having a lead-in of a World Series game that could involve an L.A. team, it could involve a New York team. Capturing an existing audience and transitioning that to the football game had some merit and value in their eyes.”

Perhaps a Yankees-Dodgers World Series matchup would help Fox keep a prolonged audience for those two markets. Kenny added that Rutgers will not face the same situation in 2025.

If any program pulled the short competitive straw, it was Michigan State. In a span of six days, the Spartans host Ohio State on Sept. 28 then travel to Oregon on a Friday. Both the Buckeyes and Ducks are likely to begin the season ranked in the top five.

It’s a semi-homecoming for new Michigan State coach Jonathan Smith, who left Oregon State last winter, and a few of the Beavers joined him in East Lansing. Plus, both Michigan State and Oregon provide quality viewership numbers, which made it attractive for Fox.

“For TV, it works really well,” Kenny said. “For the competitive side of things, that’s a lot to ask of a program or a first-year head coach playing two of the top five teams in the country back-to-back weeks.

“Alan Haller, the AD at Michigan State, has done a really great job of expressing a lot of their thoughts since that Friday piece was announced. So it’s our job to take that information and learn from it and react to it in a way that we’re not just putting Michigan State in that same situation next year. But we’re also making sure that if we can avoid it, we don’t put any of our 18 teams in a similar situation.”

Black Friday shift

Nebraska–Iowa will meet on Black Friday for the 14th consecutive year but will kick off in prime time on NBC for the first time. Wisconsin–Minnesota will join their nearby brethren on the same date but open the day at noon ET on CBS.

“For nostalgic Big Ten fans, the Big Ten West kind of rises again on Black Friday,” Kenny said.

It represents a 180-degree turn for Wisconsin to compete on Black Friday. In 2017, former Nebraska coach Mike Riley and former athletics director Shawn Eichorst wanted to shift the Iowa-Nebraska game from Friday to Saturday, and Iowa objected. The Big Ten then switched season finales beginning in 2020 with Iowa playing Wisconsin and Nebraska facing Minnesota. Then, Nebraska’s hierarchy fired both Riley and Eichorst and petitioned to resume its Black Friday tradition with Iowa. The Hawkeyes wanted to continue playing on Black Friday against Wisconsin, but former Badgers athletics director Barry Alvarez declined to move the game from Saturday. Ultimately, the schedules changed during the COVID season with Iowa-Nebraska returning to Black Friday and it was extended in perpetuity. 

With the additional television contracts, schools are granted “tolerances,” which allow them to veto certain requests. For Iowa, it’s playing a Friday night game on a non-holiday weekend because of the hospitals located across the street. Michigan has refused to play on Friday at all, which the conference allows. Wisconsin playing on Black Friday no longer is a non-starter.

“Wisconsin just added a heated playing surface into Camp Randall that obviously from a player health and safety perspective aligns with what the weather could be that time of year to make that at least a better environment for that game,” Kenny said. “But also just trying to capture with broadcast windows, you want to make sure that you’re putting your universities and your programs in the best position to really tell a story and have the opportunity to maybe capture some non-traditional viewers that wouldn’t normally watch that game on a Saturday. It just is a really unique opportunity for the Axe to have a really great stage on a national level.”

Battling on Black Friday

For the second consecutive year, the NFL will air a game on Black Friday, and this one involves Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Las Vegas Raiders. The Big Ten opted to schedule around the NFL’s 3 p.m. kickoff with the Badgers and Gophers playing at noon and Iowa-Nebraska at 7:30 p.m. rather than battle it head-on.

“The NFL didn’t ask us our thoughts on them playing on Black Friday, and we understand that they’re going to do what’s best for their business,” Kenny said. “But we’re going to continue to rely on what’s made college football great. That’s tradition. That’s pageantry. That’s matchups that really are generational in nature, and we’re going to continue to make sure that Black Friday is a meaningful experience for our fans and college football fans.”

West Coast viewing

The former Pac-12 Conference and the Big Ten forged an alliance with the Rose Bowl that began in 1947 and lasted until the western league imploded. But the affinity for the Rose Bowl in Big Ten country remains strong, and with UCLA playing its home games in that venue, it will remain a key fixture for years to come.

UCLA will open its Big Ten era on NBC’s prime-time broadcast on Sept. 14 at the Rose Bowl against Indiana. It also marks the coaching debuts of UCLA’s Deshaun Foster and Indiana’s Curt Cignetti.

Also airing on Sept. 14 include historic rivalries among former Pac-12 teams with Oregon traveling to Oregon State (3:30 p.m. Fox) and Washington facing Washington State at the Seahawks’ Lumen Field (3:30 p.m.). Although it first looked like a prime opportunity for a night kickoff, the Apple Cup will resume on Peacock because of parking and other logistics associated with Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners.

“The Mariners have a game later that night against the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers,” Kenny said. “Both the conference and Washington and NBC had conversations with the Mariners and Major League Baseball to figure out if there was optionality allowed with the game, we operated under the premise that that game had to be played at 3:30 Eastern.”

Two other West Coast prime-time kickoffs take place on Sept. 7 with Boise State traveling to Oregon (10 p.m. Peacock) and USC hosting Utah State (11 p.m. BTN).

Notre Dame, NBC and the Big Ten

NBC annually airs two Notre Dame night games, which was part of its negotiations with the Big Ten and its prime-time package. The network has options on those two weeks — Nov. 9 and Nov. 23 — which could consist of broadcasting a Big Ten game on Peacock concurrently with Notre Dame, flipping time slots with Fox or airing a late-night West Coast game.

For speculative purposes, on Nov. 9, that could entail NBC airing a noon kickoff (such as Michigan at Indiana) and allowing Fox to air Washington at Penn State in prime time. In addition, NBC could shift its game to Peacock or perhaps draft Maryland at Oregon and bump it to 10:30 p.m. Eastern. All of those options are available.

“We haven’t necessarily activated that for this season,” Kenny said. “We have to wait and see how the in-season selection process plays out.”

The Nov. 2 juggernaut

It’s unlikely a Big Ten week ever has showcased the firepower it will on Nov. 2. Two of the season’s most nationally significant games air that day with Ohio State at Penn State and Michigan at Oregon. That’s followed by the Wisconsin-Iowa rivalry at Kinnick, USC at Washington plus UCLA at Nebraska. Those games will fall under the six-to-12-day time selection window.

“In previous years if that Ohio State-Penn State game was a stand-alone big game on a weekend or Michigan-Oregon was a stand-alone game on a big weekend,” Kenny said, “you may have seen one of our broadcast partners promote that they had the first pick. But because of the depths of that week, there’s no need because things could markedly change.”

Chicago’s Big Ten team

Northwestern is scheduled to play all but two games this fall at a 15,000-seat on-campus makeshift stadium while Ryan Field is completely rebuilt. On Sept. 7, the league shifted the Wildcats’ game against Duke to Friday night so they could have some prime-time exposure.

“That’ll be an FS1 game on Friday night under the lights, which I think will really generate some buzz up there in Evanston coming off their bowl-winning season last year,” Kenny said.

(Photo: Alex Martin / Journal and Courier / USA Today)



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