Michigan, Michigan State remain protected football rivals: What we know about new Big Ten

Michigan football and Michigan State football will remain protected rivals as the Big Ten begins its westward expansion.

With the conference announcing its 2024 and 2025 schedules Thursday afternoon, the Spartans and Wolverines are among those schools who will maintain their annual series as part of the league’s “Flex Protect Plus” scheduling model as it grows to 16 teams with the additions of UCLA and USC.

Michigan-Ohio State also is one of those protected games as well, with a chance for any of those matchups to have a rematch in the Big Ten championship game with the new format that ends division play after this season.

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“I think this is a really important day and sort of sets the tone for what's to come,” new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said Thursday on "BTN Live." “And when you look at the quality of matchups, I think it's just remarkable what you're going to see on Big Ten Saturdays going forward. …

“When you move away from divisions, you make that decision that you want to have more competitive balance. So there's really two ways to think about it. You want competitive balance, you want to respect history and tradition in the conference, even as you're expanding. And you also want to connect fans. I think all those things were done with this format.”

U-M will host MSU in 2024, and the Spartans host the Wolverines in 2025. The series is one of 11 annual protected rivalries. The Wolverines travel to Columbus in 2024 and host the Buckeyes in 2025.

Specific dates for Big Ten games the next two years have not yet been released. MSU and U-M play in East Lansing on Oct. 21 this season.

Michigan’s conference games for 2024 are at home against MSU, UCLA, Maryland, Minnesota and Wisconsin along with nonconference games against Fresno State (Aug. 31), Texas (Sept. 7) and Arkansas State (Sept. 21) in Ann Arbor. The Wolverines are on the road at Ohio State, USC, Illinois and Rutgers that season.

U-M in 2025 host OSU, Penn State, Purdue and Northwestern and will travel to MSU, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland and Nebraska. The Wolverines have home games with New Mexico (Aug. 30) and Central Michigan (Sept. 13) and a road game at Oklahoma (Sept. 13) in 2025 nonconference play.

The Spartans in 2024 host Ohio State, Illinois, Indiana, Purdue and Rutgers while going on the road to U-M, Penn State, Maryland and Nebraska. They also play nonconference home games with Florida Atlantic (Aug. 31) and Louisiana (Sept. 15) and on the road at Boston College (Sept. 21).

In 2025, MSU hosts the Wolverines, Nittany Lions, UCLA and Northwestern, and the Spartans will travel to USC, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Spartans have three nonconference home games that season against Western Michigan (Aug. 30), Youngstown State (Sept. 6) and Boston College (Sept. 20).

The Big Ten is eliminating the East-West format, ending the divisional setup the league first debuted in 2011 with the addition of Nebraska. Instead, the top two teams in the overall conference standings at the end of the regular season will advance to the Big Ten championship game, with the winner earning the league’s title. Tiebreaking procedures will be announced later, according to a release from the conference.

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That means the potential exists for the Wolverines and Buckeyes to play back-to-back weeks and for MSU and U-M to meet a second time each year in the Big Ten title game.

On "BTN Live," Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith pointed out this is “an old conversation” from when the Buckeyes and Wolverines were in separate divisions in the Legends and Leaders format from 2011-13. They shifted to the same division when the conference added Rutgers and Maryland and the conference moved to an East-West format starting in 2014.

Smith said he and U-M athletic director Warde Manuel talked about the potential of ending the regular season and meeting again in the Big Ten championship game with the changes for 2024 and 2025.

“We agreed that for the betterment of the whole, the betterment of the league relative to our overall scheduling format and our television partners, that at the end of the day, we needed to accept that as a possibility,” Smith said.

The other annually protected games are Illinois-Northwestern, Illinois-Purdue, Indiana-Purdue, Iowa-Minnesota, Iowa-Nebraska, Iowa-Wisconsin, Maryland-Rutgers, Minnesota-Wisconsin and UCLA-USC.

Penn State is the only school without a protected rival, while Iowa has three.

Among the goals of the league with adding the two California schools is to balance travel annually for schools by distance, region and time zones. Another is the “balance and maximization of television inventory each season” while also remaining flexible for future evolution with the College Football Playoff expansion.

MSU does not play either USC or UCLA in 2024, while U-M plays both. That flips the following year.

“If you are a football student-athlete coming to one of our institutions and you stay for four years, you're gonna play in every other Big Ten stadium,” said Kerry Kenney, the Big Ten’s new chief operating officer who is in charge of broadcast rights negotiations and other aspects of content strategy for the league. “That's a really meaningful experience, and a lot of our athletic directors who are former Big Ten student-athletes or football student-athletes really advocated for that. …

“Every time one of our teams goes out to play in the historic Rose Bowl, in the iconic L.A. Coliseum, it's going to feel like a special, big event that first time and hopefully every other time after that. L.A. is our largest alumni base outside of our Big Ten footprint of our current member institutions, and so there's just a lot of potential and opportunity out there in the L.A. market for these games to be important.”

The other two-play opponents for each member institution will change every two years, per the league. Each school will continue to play nine Big Ten games per season, and teams will play every other conference opponent at least twice — once home and once away — in a four-year period.

“I think schedules are living things in some ways,” Petitti said. “And if you think about what they accomplish, I think there's always going to be feedback and understanding of where things are headed. But I think everybody's pretty confident this is a format that's really going to endure. I think it's built that way, to sort of go beyond these two years. So I feel really good about that. But look, I don't think we'd be doing our jobs if we don't sort of understand and take stock.”

Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan, MSU to remain protected rivals in new Big Ten schedule