The Big Ten’s 2025 football schedule was revealed Dec. 11 at 11:53 a.m. in Seattle and Eugene. Minutes later, the complaining from Washington and Oregon fans began.
The timing of our byes is terrible!
All the cross-country trips!
So many opponents have byes before they play us!
Even former Washington coach Chris Petersen was critical, telling KJR radio in Seattle that an aspect of UW’s schedule “looks like a mistake to me.”
To be fair, Petersen was responding to a question without the aid of full context.
But the Hotline has full context after examining the schedules team by team, week by week. And our reactions to the uproar in the Pacific Northwest would be the following:
1. What did you expect?
2. Washington State and Oregon State fans must be in full schadenfreude mode.
3. Seriously, what did you expect?
After joining a conference 2,500 miles away as partial-share members, did Washington and Oregon fans expect to receive the same treatment as Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State?
Did fans actually believe the Big Ten would inconvenience its 14 schools in the eastern half of the country in order to satisfy the four on the West Coast?
Scheduling is hard, folks. The Hotline has spent hundreds of hours over the years discussing and assessing the intricacies of conference scheduling, mostly with Pac-12 officials and recently with Big Ten executives.
It’s vastly more difficult than fans realize because of so many factors that never enter the public realm, including peculiarities in the media contracts, campus special requests, internal conference politics, the desire for marquee games in certain spots on the calendar and limitations created by non-conference games. (And there are a slew of others.)
With 18 teams playing nine league games and a need for competitive balance over the sweep of years, the Big Ten’s scheduling process is arguably more challenging than any in the history of the sport.
Chief Operating Officer Kerry Kenny told The Athletic that the conference went through 130 versions of the 2025 football schedule before settling on the format revealed last week.
Each of the 130 attempted to adhere to the Big Ten’s underlying Flex Protect model, which was approved by all the schools last year and is rooted in the following framework:
— Balance of annual travel by distance, regions of the conference, and time zones.
— Maintaining control and flexibility as the college football postseason format evolves, with the goal to create access for programs into an expanded College Football Playoff.
— Balance of historic competitiveness and recent competitive trends, including home/away balance of traditionally competitive schools.
Any model based on balanced travel in a conference that has four schools thousands of miles away from 14 schools is naturally going to lean toward the latter. To think anything otherwise is nonsensical.
(And the schools know that. We haven’t seen any high-ranking officials from Washington or Oregon — or USC or UCLA, for that matter — complain about the schedules.)
The Big Ten’s official version is not ideal for every school, but there was never a chance that it would be ideal for every school. And conference executives are acutely aware of which schools will face the greatest logistical and competitive challenges in 2025.
In our view, the complaints by Washington and Oregon fans are largely without merit — largely, but not entirely.
Let’s dive in.
One source of frustration with UW’s schedule is the placement of the two byes, in Weeks 3 and 10 — that they are too early and too late.
As a result, Washington won’t have a bye in Week 4 before hosting Ohio State in late September — but the Buckeyes will have two weeks to prepare for their trip to Seattle. The Big Ten had no control over the situation, because the Huskies scheduled the Apple Cup for Week 4 (in Pullman), eliminating the potential for a bye the week before conference play began.
But the most oft-cited complaint — and the specific issue Petersen commented on — is that the Huskies will face five conference opponents that are coming off byes.
While true, that’s not entirely representative of the situation. In one of those instances (at Wisconsin in early November,) the Huskies also have a bye the preceding week, so there is no competitive advantage either way.
What about the other four cases? Ohio State, Rutgers, Maryland and Illinois all have byes the week before facing UW, while the Huskies do not.
We already explained the situation with the Ohio State game — the Big Ten had no choice because of the placement of the Apple Cup. (Non-conference games are set by the schools.)
So that leaves three instances controlled by the Big Ten in which the Huskies face teams coming off byes while they are in action the previous week.
Two of those are at home: Rutgers and Illinois. And we would argue that playing at home greatly limits any disadvantage in rest, especially when the opponent is traveling across the country. Also, there is no way the Big Ten can avoid this entirely given the calculus involved.
(Bottom line: If the Huskies can’t beat Rutgers and Illinois at home, they have bigger problems than the schedule logistics.)
There is really one instance in which the Big Ten served up a difficult competitive situation for UW: The Week 6 trip to Maryland, in which the Terps will have two weeks to prepare as the home team and the Huskies must make the cross-country trek the week after playing Ohio State.
Yep, that stinks.
And our guess is the Big Ten knows that stinks. But again, when you schedule nine conference games for 18 teams and there are a barrage of factors to consider, sometimes there will be glitches that cannot be solved without creating a cascade of problems for other schools.
(Who knows: Maybe a discarded version of the schedule had the Huskies playing Michigan, not Maryland, after Ohio State.)
It’s worth noting that Washington isn’t the only team tasked with playing a road game against a home team coming off a bye.
Oregon faces that challenge with its Week 5 showdown at Penn State — a predicament caused by exactly the same issue that snagged Washington with the timing of the Ohio State game. The Ducks scheduled the Civil War for Week 4, so they could not receive a bye before the marquee matchup in Beaver Stadium.
(Oregon’s Week 11 trip to Iowa is a situation in which both teams have byes the previous week.)
And the Pacific Northwest teams aren’t alone. Michigan visits USC with the Trojans coming off a bye — think they are happy about that in Ann Arbor? — while Penn State heads to Michigan State with the Spartans off a bye. (And the Nittany Lions do it immediately after back-to-back showdowns against Ohio State and Indiana.)
Ohio State avoided being cast as the road team facing a home team coming off a bye, but the Buckeyes were served a dish of trouble in another regard: Three of their first four conference games are on the road (Washington, Illinois and Wisconsin).
Also, Ohio State and Michigan are two of eight teams that have back-to-back conference road games. The other six are Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Purdue and Rutgers.
Another point: Several games will be moved into the Fox Friday broadcast window, potentially creating an extra day of rest for teams that face opponents coming off byes.
To be clear: We aren’t suggesting the degree-of-difficulty is exactly the same across all 18 schedules. That’s simply not possible. And in certain regards, Washington and Oregon have more daunting logistical challenges than many of their peers. (Oregon faced one in 2024, as the only Big Ten team that played for a stretch of eight consecutive weeks.)
After creating 130 versions of the schedule, the Big Ten is aware of every nuance, every imbalance.
And if the same team draws a straw noticeably shorter than others over the course of several years, there’s a problem that will need addressing.
But we’ll end this commentary where we began, with a question posed to fans in the Pacific Northwest that should not need to be asked but apparently does: What did you think was going to happen?
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