Big Ten Moves to Conference-Only Schedule; So What's Next?

(Photo credit: Joe Robbins)

The Big Ten will by all appearances be moving to a conference-only schedule for football this Fall. As Boilerdowd likes to say as we hop into a quickcast….let’s talk about it.

These things happen like dominoes, so I would say you should expect the other Power 5 conferences to begin to follow suit. The SEC could be the one I’d see as being stubborn about it, but when you think more you realize they’re so self-absorbed that an SEC-only schedule is probably their collective dream anyway. It makes it harder for their QBs to pad their numbers without those random November cupcake matchups we all know go into what a meat grinder those schedules are, but hey, I digress.

What this means for Purdue’s schedule this year is the following games vaporize:

9/12 vs Memphis

9/19 vs Air Force

9/26 @ BC

Without the unusual season opener scheduled for 9/5 at Lincoln, Purdue wouldn’t have a scheduled game until 10/10 at home versus Rutgers (I’d make a joke here about Purdue thus still getting a “tune-up,” patsy game but, well, we all remember how the last PU-RU game turned out). This leads me to think the Nebraska game could get rescheduled so as to buy teams that extra month before the season would theoretically commence (all of this of course is assuming the Fall season isn’t cancelled entirely, which obviously is still on the table but for purposes of this post we’ll deal with the facts at hand presently).

Purdue and Nebraska don’t have a common open date the rest of the season, but it would seem relatively easy to put it in after the season and push the Big Ten title game (again, if that’s still expected to happen) a week or so. This would allow the other handful of Big Ten games scheduled for September to also be leapfrogged to the end of the schedule and buy the Big Ten a month longer before their start. This then pushes the necessary decision on whether a season can likely happen to early August – I’ve repeatedly heard (and it makes sense) that programs need a good two months to ramp up to a season. So July 1 had been in my head a while as a key make or break date to make some decisions – and here we are a week-ish later and for the most part, the first month of most BT teams have been nuked.

So what do the cancelled games mean with regard to making those up?

Well, Boston College was the return trip from a home-and-home Purdue agreed to, so I would think BC would expect Purdue to find a way to make their way to the Northeast at some point. Interestingly, Purdue has an open date next year on October 23 and BC’s ACC schedule is yet to be determined somehow (maybe the ACC has so many members coming and going they don’t do their schedules in advance?). Sure, it would mean a 13th game on the schedule, but you know schools are going to be making an argument for that anyway in light of losing the games this year and the likely empty stadiums.

Purdue is also off October 29, 2022, October 28, 2023, and two October dates in 2024 so maybe one of these will be slotted in there. In fact, the more I look at this, if I’m Bobinski and we assume the NCAA will be fine with an extra game for each of the next few years to correct some of this imbalance, it would be pretty easy to call those three schools now and say hey, here’s a quick solution that doesn’t require you to wait a decade to make these up. Air Force and Memphis were not slated to be home-and-home (only because Morgan Burke didn’t schedule them) so those can also be scrapped entirely, which is why I would think they’d be up for finding a way to fit them in sooner.

Other Thoughts

I saw someone from a typically slow-witted Wisconsin twitter account make a comment like “Oh, so it’ll be okay for Wisconsin to go to Rutgers but not to play Notre Dame at Lambeau?” Obviously, this solution isn’t perfect and no, that example doesn’t look like it makes a lot of sense. But if you’re worried about travel and teams bringing things in with them, then not having Air Force come to West Lafayette probably does make sense. Or if this were next season, not making Oregon State journey 2200 miles to the heartland. And I also think, as I outlined above, that it has more to do with potentially buying more time to decide if the season can happen at all.

The most fun byproduct of this for me is the idea that Notre Dame would potentially have nobody to play or, even more hilariously, only Group of Five opponents. Oh, for ND to be playing a MAC schedule in empty venues. So far, they have lost Navy and Wisconsin off their docket. If other Power 5 schools go the same route as the Big Ten, ND could be left with a schedule of Western Michigan and…potentially nobody else. Maybe they can be barnstormers and just travel the countryside playing games against anyone willing. Just join a conference, you numbnuts.

There has also been talk of adding a conference game to make a ten game season, which would seem easy enough with everyone freeing up their calendars a bit. Or, again, the model of just tacking one on at the end could also work. Ten games would feel – to me, at least – less like when you look back at schedules from like 1895 and see a single digit number of games played.

The conference has also openly talked about being able to “pause” the season if things got dangerous. I have a hard time seeing how this would truly work, as we’ve seen since March how hard it is to unpause things. I would think if the season got going and in late October or early November they needed to pause it, the most likely conclusion to the season – assuming there is one – would be in the Spring. And, honestly, that’s where I see a Spring football plan making more sense – if it’s only 4-5 games and a half-season to wrap things up. You could do it in March/April, not try to cram a full season in there and maybe juggle the NFL draft a bit to make it all work.

What’s Next

I think over the next month you’ll hear more about the potential moving of dates (like Purdue-Nebraska) and addition of another conference game, with the final decision on whether early October is feasible by about this time next month.

Also, don’t forget, nobody knows anything so who the hell knows.

Wash your hands.