Which Big Ten football team has the toughest schedule in 2024?

Even in the ever-changing world of college football that we live in, where teams are changing conferences and players are jumping from team to team like never before, one thing will always remain a constant: fans complaining that their path to the finish line is harder than anyone else.

That’s something that we constantly saw over the years in the Pac-12, and with the Oregon Ducks entering a new conference, we will undoubtedly see similar complaints going forward as well.

But are the complaints warranted?

It’s somewhat tough to tell with the new-look Big Ten now featuring an influx of competitive teams from the West Coast, seeing schools like Oregon, Washington, USC, and UCLA join the likes of Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State at the top. Beyond matchups with those teams, though, does anything really stand out as daunting?

That’s something that I really wanted to find out once and for all. With the help of ESPN’s SP+ ratings that came out this week, courtesy of Bill Connelly, we were able to group every team in the nation, give them a grade, and figure out whose schedule is the toughest on paper. Here’s a breakdown of how we assigned grades to each individual team using a tier system:

ESPN’s SP+ ranks every FBS team from 1-134. We broke those 134 teams into 20 tiers, giving the best teams in the nation a score of 10, all the way down to the worst teams in the nation getting a score of 0.

After going through each Big Ten team’s schedule, we are able to add up their total opponent score, and determine who has the highest opponent grade for the year.

Note: FCS opponents, such as Idaho and South Dakota were given a score of 0, along with the bottom-tier FBS schools.

For reference, here’s how the Big Ten teams graded out:

Grades 0-3

Indiana (3),  Purdue (3), Michigan State (3.5),

Grades 4-7

Illinois (5), …

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/big-ten-football-team-toughest-132746315.html

Author : Ducks Wire

Publish date : 2024-02-16 13:27:46

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