The Big Ten Conference has many changes fans will continue to adjust for heading into the first week of the 2024 season: new teams, no divisions, and now new policies regarding the conference’s football championship game.
The Big Ten announced Monday morning that the new policies will take place immediately for the 2024 Discover Big Ten Championship Game set for Dec. 7 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Prior to 2024, the conference had each division winner compete in the Big Ten title game to determine the league’s champion.
This season, with the newest additions of former Pac-12 schools USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon, the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the overall conference standings will face off for the Big Ten title. However, the league set standards in case of a tiebreaker circumstance.
If two teams are tied in the Big Ten standings (factoring only conference games), then the two teams would be pitted against the following rules to determine which program would advance into the title match:
This entails that any team tied for the No. 2 spot in the conference would immediately advance to the title game if they defeated the other program in a head-to-head matchup. If Team A and Team B are both 10-2, but Team A beat Team B, then Team A advances.
If both Team A and Team B share similar conference opponents, then the team with the best record in those matchups would advance. If Team A and Team B are tied in conference standings, but Team A lost to Team C while Team B defeated Team C, Team B would advance.
Now it gets interesting. If both teams that are tied entering this scenario, the conference opponents records of each conference team faced would determine the team that would advance. If Team A’s conference opponent record is 24-30 compared to Team B’s opponent records being 28-26, Team B would advance.
In the event of an unbalanced schedule (i.e., less than nine conference
games are played), the records of the two tied teams will be compared based on the best cumulative conference winning percentage of all conference opponents, regardless of how many conference opponents each team played.
Enter your tinfoil hats. If two teams continue to remain tied to this scenario, then the highest ranked team determing by the team “rating score” metric following the regular season would advance.
Ultimate chaos. Surely, no Big Ten fanbase would overreact if their school was not picked for the conference championship game?
The full tiebreaker policies can be found here. Nebraska aims to be a part of the Big Ten title game this season, but will have to overcome conference preseason favorites Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, and Michigan.
The Huskers were last in the conference championship game in 2012, when Wisconsin blasted the Big Red 70-31. Nebraska’s last conference championship came in 1999.
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