The Big Ten has already put what amounts to a salary cap in place for college athletics, and the conference may now borrow another idea from the NFL. Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork said this week that the league is exploring a results-based approach to scheduling.
Bjork discussed the conversations during an appearance on The Ryan Day Show on 97.1 The Fan. He explained that when the Big Ten first expanded to add the West Coast programs, its scheduling rotations were built on historical football records. That framework no longer reflects the current landscape.
Programs such as Indiana, he noted, look nothing like they did even five years ago. "They looked at historical rotations over the course of everyone's football life," Bjork said. "Indiana was not what Indiana is today when they set the model. Same thing with UCLA."
Under the concept Bjork described, changes could take effect with the 2028 season, and opponents would not be locked in until after the 2027 campaign concludes. Much like the NFL's dynamic model, the Big Ten would assign matchups based on how teams performed the previous year, giving struggling programs more favorable slates and stronger teams more difficult ones.
The plan would differ from the professional version in one important respect. Marquee rivalries, most notably Ohio State's annual meeting with Michigan, would be protected and remain on the schedule every season.
"So, next year's schedule, we would not know who we're playing, other than protecting the rivalry games," Bjork said. "Obviously, we have the biggest one. Other than that, the rest of the schedule could be based on how the teams finished the previous year. That's how the NFL does it."
Bjork argued that a new approach is needed because of the parity created by name, image and likeness deals and the transfer portal, and he suggested a dynamic model would be a fairer way to balance strength of schedule across the league. "We're having active conversations that we need to change the way we schedule," he said. "There's a lot more parity in the system."
There is at least one obvious complication with copying the NFL's formula. Current transfer portal and NIL rules permit essentially unlimited player movement every offseason, producing far more roster volatility from year to year than the NFL experiences, where multi-year contracts provide greater stability from one season to the next.
Even so, the idea is a notable one, and scheduling figures to remain a prominent subject of debate with the expanded 24-team College Football Playoff on the horizon.
