If you think about it, when the Big Ten decided 10 seasons ago to make its alignment for football geographical, the conference took all the true legends and leaders and put them in one division. Yes, we’re talking the big boys: Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State.
The Big Ten East has been a beast since its inception, and these are the three massive reasons why. In the AP poll era, which began in 1936, they’ve combined for 13 national championships, 11 perfect seasons and 78 bowl victories. Penn State has had four double-digit win seasons in this division. Michigan has produced five. OSU did it every year but during the COVID-shortened 2020 season. They own the three largest stadiums in all of college football, each of their homes capable of welcoming well in excess of 100,000 spectators.
More to the point, Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State have won eight of the nine Big Ten Championship football games since the divisions were split to East and West. In the 2023 season, they stand with a collective 19-0 record and occupy the No. 2 (Michigan), No. 3 (Ohio State) and No. 7 (Penn State) positions in this week’s polls. They fill three of the top four spots in statistician Jeff Sagarin’s ratings.
And this week will begin the annual three-way competition between the Wolverines, Buckeyes and Nittany Lions to determine which team’s fan base will get the pleasure of traveling to Indianapolis on the first weekend of December and watching their men roll through the team from the Big Ten West fortunate enough – or unfortunate, depending on one’s perspective – to earn the privilege of losing at Lucas Oil Stadium by multiple touchdowns.
It is the start of the last ride for the Big Ten East.
And it’s going out in style.
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When Penn State (6-0) visits “the Horseshoe” to face Ohio State (6-0) Saturday at noon, the race for the Big Ten East truly will ignite. Michigan will travel to Penn State at noon Nov. 11. And the B1G one in the Big House between the Buckeyes and Wolverines will be at the same time Nov. 25.
“It’s the toughest division in college football, with three of the premier programs in college football,” former Penn State tight end Adam Breneman, host of the ‘Next Up with Adam Breneman’ podcast, told The Sporting News. “These games and rivalries have meant so much to the conference and the sport for a long time. Some of the best games in the last decade of college football have been Penn State-Ohio State, Ohio State-Michigan and Michigan-Penn State.
“There’s a lot of familiarity and a lot of bad blood -- but also a lot of respect between the programs.”
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The Big Ten will abandon divisions after this season. That likely would have occurred even without the significant expansion that will arrive for the 2024 season, with Oregon, USC, Washington and UCLA joining the conference. The Big 12 and ACC already discarded their divisional alignments, and the SEC is following that route next autumn.
The Big Ten instead created a scheduling format that employs “protected rivalries”, and while Michigan-OSU is one of them, Penn State against anybody is not. So there still will be periodic matchups between the Lions and Wolverines, or the Lions and Buckeyes, but we won’t have the dependable trio of heavyweight showdowns we’ve enjoyed for the last decade.
Penn State and Ohio State will meet next season, but the Lions won’t play Michigan. Instead, they’ll visit USC at the LA Coliseum for the first time since 1991.
“The reality of the situation is they want flexibility with scheduling,” NBC Sports analyst Joshua Perry, a former Buckeyes linebacker, told TSN. “I understand that. I think if you ask Ohio State fans, they consider Penn State to be a rivalry. I think if you ask Penn State fans, they’ll say the same thing. You should want to give fans a little bit more of that. I really do think, though, when it comes to the 12-team College Football Playoff in an expanded conference format, you want to have as much flexibility as possible to where you get, in any given year, three or maybe a fourth team out of the Big Ten an opportunity to play in that postseason.
“When it comes down to making that decision, which is probably the right one, it comes at the expense of playing one of the great games we’ve seen from the Big Ten in the last decade or so, or even further back than that.”
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The performances of incoming Big Ten members Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA this season –all four are in the Top 25, and they own a combined 22-4 record – shows the change will not offer any relief in terms of the level of competition. It will take time, though, to build up the level of familiarity in place in the Big Ten East. And the chemistry will always be different.
Michigan and Ohio State have engaged in one of – is it necessary to say “one of”? – college football’s best rivalries since first meeting in 1897. The Buckeyes and Lions first played in 1912, then six more times before Penn State joined the Big Ten. It is one of the curiosities of college football history that Michigan has endured as a power for a century, and Penn State for more than half that, without the two ever playing until the Nittany Lions joined the Big Ten in 1993.
Some of those UM-PSU games have been extraordinary, though, such as when Mario Manningham caught the touchdown pass that cost the Lions a shot at the 2005 national title, or when Penn State earned a 43-40 victory in four overtimes in 2013. The Big Ten East has made these games an annual occasion.
“Any time there’s a big game, you kind of get up for that. As a competitor, as a player, big brand on big brand – that’s why you play football. That’s why you get into sports in general. It’s that competitive fire,” BTN analyst Jake Butt, a former All-American tight end for Michigan, told TSN. “What is added in the context of Ohio State versus Michigan, and Penn State – those three – is the familiarity with each team. You have a history against them. You know those guys. You get recruited by all of them. So the sweetness of victory is amplified, and the pain of loss is amplified.
“You’re kind of intertwined. It’s like wrestling with your brother.”
Drew Allar, a first-year starter at quarterback, is one of three Ohio natives on the Penn State roster, and because his position is so high-profile, his return is generating a lot of media attention. But it’s kind of an old story. Because there are “homecomings” whenever these teams intersect.
Michigan has eight Ohioans on its roster and two from Pennsylvania. Ohio State has four from Michigan and two Pennsylvania natives, wide receivers Marvin Harrison and Julian Fleming. OSU QB Kyle McCord went to high school with Harrison in Philadelphia.
“You’ve got so many of these guys coming from the same high schools on different teams,” Breneman said. “You think about a guy like Fleming, that guy’s been involved in the Penn State and Ohio State programs for the better part of a decade, from his recruiting process to now being on the field.”
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This format has been kinder to some than to others. Ohio State is 14-3 in matchups against the other two members of the Big Ten East power trio. Michigan is 8-9. Penn State is 4-14.
Lions coach James Franklin could not have been disappointed to see this format go.
“I’m being honest: I think up until probably two years ago, Ohio State was the only serious national championship contender in the Big Ten, and I think that Penn State and Michigan were certainly national players to a degree,” Perry said. “But if we’re talking about four-team playoff, really give them a chance and we think they can do it, I don’t think either of the teams were good enough outside of Ohio State to push for that.
“Now, I think you can make a legitimate argument. We’ve seen what Michigan has done in back-to-back years. Penn State is as good as they’ve been under James Franklin. I think they’re a fantastic team. And Ohio State’s been right there. I think the rest of the conference has caught up to a certain degree.”
No one would have thought to jeopardize the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry in the restructuring of the conference. Even that game could change, though, in a sense. Because if the Buckeyes and Wolverines finish 1-2 in the league in future years – and that’s certainly not an unlikely scenario, given the might of the two programs – they would qualify for the Big Ten Championship game and meet in consecutive weeks.
“I have zero concern about the change, at all. I think that game should remain the last weekend. I just think it fits with Thanksgiving,” Butt told TSN. “If you’ve got to play in a rematch, I think that’s fun. What I’ve come to understand is, the initial panic in things – like, 'The transfer portal and NIL are going to ruin college football.' Actually, the opposite happened. 'Hey, this is going to be really, really bad. We can’t have them play in consecutive weeks.' Says who?”
It is a chore to pick the best of the games played among the three teams in this era. It could have been the 2017 shootout in Columbus, when All-American Saquon Barkley returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown and later scored on a 36-yard sprint but J.T. Barrett led a fourth-quarter comeback with three TD passes for a 39-38 Ohio State victory.
It could have been the Buckeyes’ visit to Happy Valley a year earlier, when the Lions pulled an upset with a blocked field goal with 4:27 left, Grant Haley dashing 60 yards with that ball for the TD that made it 24-21.
It could have been later that season, when Michigan visited the Horseshoe and fell 30-27 in double-overtime, with essentially the most important play being an official’s trot from the sideline to the near hash mark to spot the ball on Barrett’s bootleg 4th-and-short run. It was ruled a first down, and the winning touchdown followed.
Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh’s comments followed that. “I’m bitterly disappointed in the officiating,” he said. “I can’t make that any more clear.”
The history of this competition suggests all three of this year’s games will be intensely competitive. At the end, one of them will stand as champion. Or maybe all of them will.
It seems conceivable, at this point, they could remain undefeated against the rest of the Big Ten and then knock each other off. For instance, Ohio State beats Penn State, Penn State beats Michigan, Michigan beats Ohio State. In that case, they’ll start sorting through the list of conference tiebreakers and possibly arrive at No. 5, which might not be great news for Michigan.
The fifth tiebreaker: “The records of the three teams will be compared based on the best cumulative conference winning percentage of non-divisional opponents.”
The Wolverines have yet to play a Big Ten West team with a winning league record. Penn State defeated Iowa, which leads the West at 3-1. Ohio State still has an Oct. 28 game against Wisconsin, which is a half-game behind the Hawkeyes. So the games those teams play will matter, as well.
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Just not as much as those involving the Big Ten’s B1G 3.
The obvious solution to the tiebreaking nightmare is not to be tied, but to win all the games. One at a time, of course.
“This is a tremendous opportunity. We’re trying to find a way to get a win this week,” Franklin told reporters at his weekly news conference. “But we approach it the same every single week. This is a really important game because of how we handled the previous six.”
That’s been a problem, at times, for these three. Ohio State twice blew College Football Playoff opportunities by falling to opponents outside this circle: in 2017 at Iowa and a year later at Purdue. Penn State’s 2016 Big Ten champions missed because of a non-league loss to rival Pitt. Michigan was able to survive a 37-33 loss to in-state rival Michigan State in 2021 and still reach the sport’s final four.
All three have avoided such blunders to date. Which isn’t totally new for Ohio State and Michigan. They’ve each had at least one perfect regular season as Big Ten East titans. Penn State has not.
“For James Franklin, every year you are constantly being compared to Ryan Day and Jim Harbaugh. This weekend, this is as big of a game as there’s been in the Franklin era at Penn State," Breneman told TSN. “For the first time for Penn State-Ohio State that I can remember, it’s not like Penn State is going in there as somewhat of a big underdog. It’s like Penn State fans expect to win this game, and it’s time to get it done.
“It just speaks to the landscape of being compared constantly to those two programs. For Harbaugh, for a long time, that was the issue, that he couldn’t win the big one. And now Ryan Day is getting flak that he can’t beat Michigan. And Franklin has been getting crap for his whole tenure that he can’t beat Ohio State and Michigan. It’s a trifecta, for sure, and I’m sure it drives all three coaches crazy.”
