The race for the Big Ten championship will be more crowded than it’s ever been before in 2024.
For the first time, the Big Ten features 18 schools after adding four teams from the West Coast this offseason. Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington join the conference’s 14 returning members in competition for two spots in the Big Ten Championship Game. And while there’s no longer a disparity between East and West in the newly divisionless conference, some teams drew significantly tougher schedules than others in the Big Ten’s first year as an 18-team league.
With that in mind, I took a look at all 18 Big Ten teams’ schedules to forecast which games each of them will win and which games each of them will lose to put together a preseason prediction for how the conference standings will shake out this fall, including who will win the Big Ten Championship Game.