In late June of 2022, when UCLA and USC announced they would join the Big Ten, I determined that the end of the Pac-12, Oregon joining the new conference, and the need to expand my film library and player database were inevitable. In early July of last year I began acquiring and charting the tape of every Big Ten football game played against FBS opponents in 2021 and 2022 I hadn’t already reviewed, and by last month had completed the project.
With this past weekend’s announcement that Oregon and UW will in fact become members of the Big Ten for the 2024 football season along with the LA schools, I prepared a simple statistical regression of the dataset from charting those games, using the same system with which I’ve been writing about Oregon’s Pac-12 and notable non-conference opponents for more than a decade.