Big Ten Football 2024 & 2025

Update: Illinois Football 2024 & 2025 Big Ten Opponents

2024
Home: Michigan, Iowa, Purdue, Maryland
Away: Ohio State, USC, Michigan State, Northwestern, Rutgers

2025
Home: Ohio State, UCLA, Indiana, Minnesota, Northwestern
Away: Penn State, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Purdue

Am I likely to be in a meeting during this? Oh you betcha... Shoot...

if history is any guide
we will play USC & Penn St on the road
but they will give us home games vs Ohio St and Michigan

yea, they'll throw us a bone with Rutgers and IU at home , but offset that and make us go to Wiscy and Maryland
then NW at home

going 6-3 in any given year will be a major accomplishment

I hope USC gets 3 road November games in the upper Midwest

It sounds like if the flex protect happens, then every team will have one rival except Iowa will have 3 and Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Michigan State will each have 2. That means we get northwestern and cycle through everyone else. Could be worse, but certainly could have been better. I feel like Purdue or Indiana would have been a very logical annual rival. But I also imagine that they probably wanted most teams to just have one rival and probably wanted to spread the lower tier teams around to play everyone.

If Ohio State and Penn State aren’t paired up though I think that is a really bogus move.

Seems like a good model for revenue. Michigan will have MSU and tOSU for example, and really should have both those as rivalries. But not all teams will have the same attractiveness, especially when you consider the history.

Any guesses as to who gets how many?

meh
its a matter of 2-3 years at most anyway, before B1G goes to 18 or 20 and then they are forced to go with new divisions
they know that and want to avoid the arguments now, just to go thru it all over again in 2 years .
The league will expand again, and then they will be forced to have a new west and a new east

Dan said:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1666566163051036675

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One of my best friends from high school has been dating Nicole for a long time, and I have had the pleasure to get to know her. I will see both this Saturday for some drinks, so I wish this came out a bit later so I could come back to Loyalty with a SUPER DUPER SECRET scoop and be a momentary insider!

Fighter of the Nightman said:

One of my best friends from high school has been dating Nicole for a long time, and I have had the pleasure to get to know her. I will see both this Saturday for some drinks, so I wish this came out a bit later so I could come back to Loyalty with a SUPER DUPER SECRET scoop and be a momentary insider!

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And had you become that momentary insider, I might have then asked you who our starting PG will be for the first basketball game in November. Moral of the story --- just be glad events are playing out as they are! And say hi to Nicole for all of us.....

Also it sucks that we’ll probably just get one rivalry with Northwestern … if we’d not been garbage for three decades, Illinois/Iowa would be an epic rivalry already and only improving with Bret at the helm.

Fighter of the Nightman said:

Also it sucks that we’ll probably just get one rivalry with Northwestern … if we’d not been garbage for three decades, Illinois/Iowa would be an epic rivalry already and only improving with Bret at the helm.

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We keep trying to force rivalries upon ourselves. NW is all there is. You have to look at it from the other direction. Which other school considers Illinois their top rival? Iowa? Nope. Wisconsin? Nope. Indiana? Nope. Purdue? Nope. And don't even think Michigan. We get NW because no one else wants NW either.

Mr. Tibbs said:

if history is any guide
we will play USC & Penn St on the road
but they will give us home games vs Ohio St and Michigan

yea, they'll throw us a bone with Rutgers and IU at home , but offset that and make us go to Wiscy and Maryland
then NW at home

going 6-3 in any given year will be a major accomplishment

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I'll disagree only because Illinois football's scheduling woes have always been about self-inflicted non-conference scheduling. I can't remember many situations where I felt the conference gave Illinois football a terrible break for conference scheduling, in fact I would argue the schedule has been great in recent years.

Let's see those predictions - can be what you want to happen or what you think will happen:

How many protected rivals for Illinois? And who are the rival(s)?

From what I have seen, what people consider Illinois' main rival is somewhat based upon where the fan is from and/or what they do. Bloomington-Normal, Peoria, and west, it's Iowa. Southern half of the state, Indiana. Chicagoland and Northern part of the state, Northwestern. If you are an engineer or you moved to Indiana after graduation, Purdue or Indiana. Besides the B1G, a lot of people say Mizzou but we only play them in football periodically.

So, Illinois gets NW as the primary rival because OSU has Mich., Indiana has Purdue, etc. NW will be our protected rival if we get only one. If we get 2 or 3, it will depend. Let's see what happens.

Pennsy said:

We keep trying to force rivalries upon ourselves. NW is all there is. You have to look at it from the other direction. Which other school considers Illinois their top rival? Iowa? Nope. Wisconsin? Nope. Indiana? Nope. Purdue? Nope. And don't even think Michigan. We get NW because no one else wants NW either.

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But I think you just proved my point ... it is Illinois' futility in the modern era of Big Ten football that has brought about that situation. I went to the Iowa/Illinois basketball game in Iowa City last year ... ask an Iowa fan who their biggest rival is in basketball, and you will absolutely get a plurality saying Illinois (and vice versa, at the moment). The fanfare and hype for that game was insane, with the PA person calling it a rivalry what seemed like every ten seconds.

It stands to reason that if we had the same winning percentage in football since 1980 that we do in basketball, Illinois/Iowa would absolutely be a rivalry in that sport, too. And that is my point ... we "earned" Northwestern as our ONLY rival by being terrible for three straight decades. If we were historically good (like we are in basketball), the Illinois/Northwestern might still be our token end-of-the-year game for football due to logistics, but it wouldn't be our ONLY protected rivalry. Georgia ends its season each year with Georgia Tech, but their fans still get a protected rivalry for a much bigger matchup with Florida. And if we weren't terrible, we might still have Northwestern on Thanksgiving Weekend, but it wouldn't be our ONLY protected rivalry (Michigan is still going to play MSU every single season, even if OSU is "the main rivalry" for them, for example).

It would be more similar to how it is in basketball, where we acknowledge its "official" status as a "rivalry," but it's not that big of a deal ... again, think Tennessee/Vanderbilt and Georgia/Georgia Tech. If we had a certain number of protected rivalries in basketball for Big Ten play, do you seriously think our only protected rival would be Northwestern? I flat-out guarantee you we'd get one of Iowa or Indiana as "no-brainer," as well. I am not disagreeing with you that we are NOW in the situation where Northwestern is the only game we will have "protected" by the Big Ten as a rivalry ... I'm just saying it did not have to be that way, which was the point of my original post.

Shief said:

From what I have seen, what people consider Illinois' main rival is somewhat based upon where the fan is from and/or what they do. Bloomington-Normal, Peoria, and west, it's Iowa. Southern half of the state, Indiana. Chicagoland and Northern part of the state, Northwestern. If you are an engineer or you moved to Indiana after graduation, Purdue or Indiana. Besides the B1G, a lot of people say Mizzou but we only play them in football periodically.

So, Illinois gets NW as the primary rival because OSU has Mich., Indiana has Purdue, etc.

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I would disagree that most in Chicagoland say Northwestern, even in football - assuming that we are looking at each fan's subjective opinion on what matchup means the most to them. Circa 2008 or so, I think you would have had a good number of "dreamer" fans who'd say Ohio State or Michigan (the former is at least an "official" rivalry, lol), some saying Indiana simply due to hoops, some Northwestern because it's the end of the year, some saying Mizzou, some saying Iowa, etc.

However, I think over the next several years (depending on how the schedules fall), it is primed to be Iowa and Missouri for most Illini fans. As you noted, geography will play a role. Iowa practically boiled over as a rivalry on the hoops side, and the fact that we finally beat them and are trending up, as well as Bret having played there, will hopefully throw some fire on that dormant rivalry. I also think restarting the Mizzou series on campuses will be a breath of fresh air for both schools. Missouri is in rivalry limbo in the SEC (for some reason, MU and Arkansas fans are like strangely adamant that they are NOT rivals on social media ... not sure I get why it matters, but that's the feeling!), and the football environment in St. Louis just never replicated the specialness of Braggin' Rights.

Northwestern and Purdue

mhuml32 said:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1666892856542330880

Northwestern and Purdue

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It's a freaking outrage that Iowa gets the most permanently easy schedule with IA-NE and IA-WI not being rivalries at all.

However, it's hard not to see that as a piece of a soft little conspiracy to leave the B1G West a slice of our easier division advantage to smooth over these negotiations, with IL-PU being an obvious part.

We make out reasonably well in this deal all told. Glad they're staying at 9 games too. The SEC ought to be ashamed of themselves.

hard to complain with those rivals. they could have made us play the illini-buck every year.

Illinois Football 2024 & 2025 Big Ten Opponents

2024
Home: Michigan, Iowa, Purdue, Maryland
Away: Ohio State, USC, Michigan State, Northwestern, Rutgers

2025
Home: Ohio State, UCLA, Indiana, Minnesota, Northwestern
Away: Penn State, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Purdue

RIP Easy Schedule Era (2006-2023)

An opportunity we missed and missed and missed and maybe, hopefully, have grabbed onto at the last second.

ChiefGritty said:

It's a freaking outrage that Iowa gets the most permanently easy schedule with IA-NE and IA-WI not being rivalries at all.

However, it's hard not to see that as a piece of a soft little conspiracy to leave the B1G West a slice of our easier division advantage to smooth over these negotiations, with IL-PU being an obvious part.

We make out reasonably well in this deal all told. Glad they're staying at 9 games too. The SEC ought to be ashamed of themselves.

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Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd much rather play NW and PU every year than NE and WI. I think I might prefer both NW over NE and PU over WI.

It would have been unlikely, but glad we aren't paired with one of the many top tier schools.

2024 is brutal…..2025 much easier