Big Ten conference realignment: What schools has the league added over the past 35 years?
If the effects of college football realignment didn’t feel real heading into the 2024 college football season, they likely do now.
As conference play has begun across the country over the past several weeks, there have been several matchups between teams with little shared history or geographical identity. Michigan State ventured to Oregon. USC traveled up to Minnesota to face off against the Golden Gophers. Washington flew across the country to play Rutgers on a Friday night.
This week, Washington will head to Iowa, Minnesota will make the trek to UCLA, Penn State will travel to Los Angeles to play USC and Ohio State will take on Oregon in the Pacific Northwest.
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For as much intrigue as some of these contests carry — who doesn’t want to see a pair of top-five teams like the Buckeyes and Ducks square off? — there’s something inherently odd about each contest. What would have been one-off games or part of a home-and-home agreement are now conference matchups.
Perhaps no league in college sports has more effectively exhibited the twists and turns of conference realignment this century than the Big Ten.
What was once an entity with a confined regional footprint and a membership count that was true to the league’s namesake is now an 18-team behemoth that stretches from coast to coast. The schools that have joined the conference’s ranks over the past 35 years also reflect the forces that drove realignment at particular moments in time.
As the new-look league enters the spotlight with marquee matchups Saturday like Ohio State-Oregon and Penn State-USC, here’s a look at how the Big Ten expanded to where it is today:
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Big Ten expansion
The Big Ten didn’t nearly double in size overnight. The conference’s growth was more gradual, with schools added one by one (or two by two). With those moves, a league that included the University of Chicago among its members as recently as 1946 now features USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington.
How did the once unmistakably Midwestern league get to this point?
Penn State joins in 1990
For 40 years, the Big Ten was true to its namesake, with 10 members following the addition of Michigan State in 1950.
As the 1990s approached, though, that changed. In 1990, the conference’s membership voted to add Penn State, a football independent and an Atlantic 10 member in most other sports. Though it put the Big Ten over 10 schools — a change it accommodated for with a new logo in which an “11” appeared in the negative space — the move made sense, with the conference bringing in an enormous school from a contiguous state that just so happened to have one of the top college football programs in the country.
The move paid immediate dividends for both parties. In 1994, in its second season as a football member, the Nittany Lions went undefeated and won the Rose Bowl.
Big Ten nearly adds Notre Dame in 1999
The conference very nearly expanded again to another white whale of a football independent — though, more accurately, this would have been a golden whale.
Big Ten leadership pursued Notre Dame in a move that would have given the league a third school in Indiana while breaking the Fighting Irish’s longstanding and cherished run as an independent. Though the school’s faculty senate endorsed the idea, Notre Dame’s board of trustees ultimately voted against becoming the Big Ten’s 12th member in February 1999.
"Notre Dame has a distinct identity that is the product of more than a century-and-a-half of institutional independence," Notre Dame president Edward A. Malloy said at the time. "As a Catholic university with a national constituency, we believe independence continues to be our best way forward, not just in athletics, but, first and foremost, in fulfillment of our academic aspirations."
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Nebraska added in 2011
Over a decade after being rebuffed by the Fighting Irish, the Big Ten once again set its sights on bringing in a 12th school. In December 2009, the conference announced it was pursuing expansion, noting in a statement that “the timing is right.”
After months of speculation on what school would bring the storied conference to a dozen, the Big Ten’s board of presidents and chancellors unanimously voted to bring in Nebraska. Like Penn State nearly 20 years earlier, the Cornhuskers brought with them a sense of geographic continuity as a state that already bordered the conference’s footprint and, far more notably, a historically accomplished football program.
At the time, Nebraska was coming off a 10-win season under second-year coach Bo Pelini and had won three national championships in the previous 16 years. While announcing the news, Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman said the Big Ten provided the school with stability "that the Big 12 simply cannot offer."
The Big Ten heads east with Maryland and Rutgers additions
Shortly after Nebraska was unveiled as the conference’s 12th institution, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said the league would “pause” from further additions for the next 12 to 18 months.
Ultimately, he proved to be a man of his word — but the wait for more didn’t last far beyond that stated period.
In November 2012, news leaked that the Big Ten was expanding eastward by bringing in Maryland and Rutgers, two schools that, unlike Penn State and Nebraska, could not be considered Midwestern by any sort of definition. The factors that brought the Terrapins and Scarlet Knights to the Big Ten were different than the ones that had attracted the conference to Penn State and Nebraska.
Though they enjoyed stretches of respectability, neither Maryland nor Rutgers had ever won a BCS bowl game, with the Terrapins making the only appearance between the two a decade earlier. What they did, however, was bring the New York, Washington D.C. and Baltimore media markets under the Big Ten umbrella, opening the Big Ten Network and the fees that come with carrying it to millions of new cable subscribers.
The moves came two months after the ACC added Notre Dame in all sports but football, a development that ESPN reported had made the Big Ten “itchy about further expansion.”
While both schools faced sizable exit fees to their respective conferences — especially Maryland, which had voted against the ACC’s exit fee increase to $50 million — Rutgers and Maryland both needed the financial windfall the Big Ten stood to offer them. In December 2011, the Newark Star-Ledger reported the Scarlet Knights lost $26.8 million in 2010-11, forcing the university to divert millions from student fees, tuition and state tax dollars to balance the athletic department budget. The Terrapins, meanwhile, had cut seven varsity teams in July 2012 to make up for what the Washington Post reported to be a $4 million deficit.
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The Big Ten raids the Pac-12 for four schools
Each of the Big Ten’s additions going back to Penn State in 1990 set some kind of geographic precedent for the league, either expanding the conference ever so slightly to the east or west.
In 2022, it came forward with its most shocking move yet.
That June, it was reported that UCLA and USC, about 1,500 miles away from the conference’s western-most member (Nebraska), would be joining the Big Ten after 94 and 100 years, respectively, in the Pac-12.
Both schools described the move in almost precautionary terms by nabbing a seat at a coveted table while it was available to them. UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond told ESPN that the Bruins “wanted to operate in a position of strength” while Mike Bohn, his USC counterpart, said in a statement that the university needed to “ensure it is best positioned and prepared for whatever happens next” in “the most volatile and uncertain era in the history of American collegiate athletics.”
"I don't believe there's a college administrator in the country that didn't recognize that clearly there were two conferences that were separating themselves from everyone else," Bohn said to the Los Angeles Times. "That particular (Oklahoma-Texas) move (to the SEC) further emphasized that."
The departure of what were arguably its two marquee brands sent the Pac-12 reeling, with much of the league’s remaining membership searching for a stable new home.
Mere days after Colorado left the Pac-12 for the Big 12 in July 2023, bringing the Pac-12 down to nine schools, Oregon and Washington were extended invitations to the Big Ten, which they quickly accepted.
That security same with a caveat. Both the Ducks and Huskies were reportedly set to only receive a half-share of the Big Ten’s annual payout upon joining the league, though that figure would grow every year. Despite bringing in less than they otherwise would have, the average Big Ten school received about $60.5 million during the most recent fiscal year, which would mean even half that mark would be competitive with what ACC and Big 12 schools bring in, and more than what the Pac-12 was reportedly set to dole out under a streaming-centric proposed media rights deal.
For the Big Ten’s most recent additions, the rationale for the decision was a familiar one.
"We are proud of our rich history with the Pac-12 and for more than a year have worked hard to find a viable path that would keep it together,” Washington president Ana Mari Cauce said in a statement. “I have tremendous admiration and respect for my Pac-12 colleagues. Ultimately, however, the opportunities and stability offered by the Big Ten are unmatched.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Big Ten conference expansion: What schools has 18-team league added?
