Ohio State’s Gene Smith Expects Big Ten To Stick With Nine Conference Games

On Feb 26, 2022

When the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 announced The Alliance last summer, it was reported that the three conferences hoped to schedule annual non-conference matchups among their member schools.

However, those plans are no longer on the table, as Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said he expects the Big Ten to continue to play nine conference games each season rather than drop to eight like the ACC and Pac-12 in order to make room for such matchups.

“When we first started The Alliance, everything about scheduling, and that kind of shifted a little bit,” Smith said during a press conference at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center on Feb. 16. “We did have the eight versus nine (conference games) conversation more intensely at that time, but we moved away from that pretty quickly because many of us felt nine was still right for us in our scheduling models.

“We felt that conference contests – when you look at it across the board from a TV partner point of view – were just as valuable, so we decided to kind of walk away from that a little bit. That doesn’t mean it might not come back up (in the future), but at that point in time we walked away.”

With that, the focus for the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 shifted to voting together on important matters, such as delaying the expansion of the College Football Playoff until after its television rights contract with ESPN expires at the end of the 2025 season – something they succeeded at doing when they were the only three conferences to vote against a 12-team format last week.

“The value of The Alliance was bringing together schools that think alike,” Smith said. “We’re broad-based in thought process relative to sports sponsorship and educationally based schools, so we kind of looked that way more than anything.”

While the scheduling portion of The Alliance was enticing and could have created marquee matchups between the conferences, Ohio State already has home-and-home series set with Notre Dame in 2022-23, Washington in 2024-25, Texas in 2025-26, Alabama in 2027-28, Georgia in 2030-31 and Oregon in 2032-33.

Reducing the number of conference games to eight could allow the Buckeyes to schedule an additional opponent from those conferences each season, but it would be impossible to keep their current agreements with the Crimson Tide and Bulldogs in a world where the Big Ten remains at nine conference games and also makes The Alliance a priority.

“That’s the reason right there,” Smith said. “I just don’t see philosophically for us a scheduling model that’s really worked where we would be supportive of that change. Nine makes sense to us. I’m still willing to listen to eight, but even if we go eight, I’m not so sure we’re going to mess around and schedule or we’re carry the load for the conference and schedule Pac-12 and ACC schools.

“We’re going to play whoever it is, and it might be a Pac-12 or ACC school. Washington’s on our schedule down the road, but I don’t see us making any changes that way. Those games are huge. It’s like Notre Dame. What is this, the sixth time we’ve played Notre Dame in the regular season? It’s the coolest thing, so yeah, I don’t see us making that change.”

Now that the Big Ten is set on playing a nine-game schedule, what that looks like moving forward is unclear. In fact, the conference is considering eliminating divisions as soon as next season and having the teams with the two best records meet in the Big Ten Championship Game rather than the winners of each division, as has been the case since 2011.

Smith is in favor of scrapping divisions for several reasons, including that it would allow teams to play a road game at every Big Ten venue during an athlete’s career. But he also wants to see some things remain intact, such as protected rivalry games.

“I just think Ohio State should be picked every year to go,” Smith joked. “I personally don’t have a preference. I’m OK with losing divisions, but I’m interested in seeing the models first.

“One of the things I want to make sure we do is try and mitigate some of the issues. One of the issues that has been challenging for a number of our schools is a student-athlete can go through four years and never play at a certain place, so I want to see if there’s a way to fix that. We’ve also got to protect our rivalries. Obviously we’ve got to do that, so in the new models where there’s no divisions, what does that look like?

“Also, with the CFP, what’s the value of the championship game? We’ve got to talk about that. Is that something that in the CFP calendar structure, is that still as valuable as it has been? All of those discussions are ongoing. I really don’t have a strong preference yet. I want to listen to my colleagues, I want to learn and I just want to protect our rivalries and find a way to make sure kids have a chance to play everywhere.”