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Only 98 days remain until the 2025 Big Ten football season kicks off.
Thursday of Week 1 sees Wisconsin host Miami (OH), Minnesota host Buffalo, Rutgers host Ohio and Nebraska visit Cincinnati. The full conference is then in action throughout the weekend, headlined by Ohio State hosting Texas.
Another season of the 18-team conference should bring a further sense of normality. Since 2024 was the first year post-expansion, it took some time to get used to watching USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington play with the ‘B10’ logo on their uniforms.
Even with a new conference dynamic, its projected top contenders shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — Ohio State, Oregon and Penn State will all be ranked among the top teams in the sport. They will be closely followed in the conference by Michigan, USC and others.
A question surrounds how some of those top contenders will manage their tough schedules. Another exists regarding middle-tier teams with favorable paths, like Indiana had last season.
To address both, we utilized ESPN’s Bill Connelly’s initial SP+ rankings to evaluate the difficulty of every Big Ten team’s conference schedule. As a reminder, here is our method:
The equation used to compare each slate is simple. First, we take each team’s SP+ rating to find a numerical value for every game. The higher that number, the tougher the matchup. We then add every opponent’s SP+ rating together to find a total opponent score. That large number is divided by the number 9 (total games) to find the average opponent score — a number that can then be compared to the SP+ leaderboard to find, on average, what a team will face each week in conference play.
Connelly released updated post-spring SP+ numbers earlier this week. After those updates, here is a fresh look at the Big Ten’s strength of conference schedule rankings for the 2025…
Source link : https://badgerswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/badgers/football/2025/05/25/big-ten-football-2025-conference-schedule-ranking-update/83794139007/
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Publish date : 2025-05-25 11:01:00
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