Gophers football challenges will mount when Big Ten divisions go away

The Big Ten last week gave football fans a glimpse of the future when it announced each team's conference opponents for the 2024 and '25 seasons, the first two years of a 16-team league including USC and UCLA.

Key in the announcement, too, was the confirmation that after one last go-round in 2023, the Big Ten is scrapping its divisional format. No more East and West divisions — or their Leaders and Legends predecessors — starting in the fall of 2024.

What does that mean for the Gophers? That can be answered in a mathematical equation.

The subtraction of divisions, combined with the addition of two teams, will multiply the challenges Minnesota faces in its quest to win the Big Ten championship.

The Gophers, as their fanbase knows all too well, have not won a Big Ten championship since they shared the title with Indiana and Purdue in 1967. And since the conference adopted a championship game starting in 2011, the Gophers have not advanced to that event under either the Leaders and Legends format (2011-13) or East-West alignment (2014-present).

Minnesota's best chances to reach Indianapolis for the Big Ten title game have been during the East-West era, and the Gophers have had some near-misses.

In 2014, Wisconsin's season-ending 34-24 win over Minnesota sent the Badgers to the title game rather than the Gophers.

In 2019, the Gophers tied Wisconsin for the West title with a 7-2 Big Ten record, but the Badgers went to Indy because of a head-to-head win. Had the Gophers beaten either Wisconsin or Iowa that year, they would have advanced to the title game.

In 2021, a 27-22 loss at Iowa prevented the Gophers from sharing the West title with the Hawkeyes and playing in Indy via the head-to-head tiebreaker.

Last year, a mistake-filled 20-10 loss to Purdue prevented the Gophers from winning the West outright instead of the Boilermakers.

History shows that the East — with powers Michigan and Ohio State, plus Penn State — has been the better of the two divisions and that the West winner usually isn't the second-best team in the conference.

The East has won all nine Big Ten title games in this format, doing so by an average score of 36-16. The East champ has never had more than one conference loss, while the West champ has had two conference losses three times and three losses once (last year with Purdue).

The NCAA eased restrictions on conference championship games last year, allowing leagues to pick the participants rather than have division winners advance. The Pac-12 immediately eliminated its divisions, and the ACC will this season, with the SEC's divisions going away starting in 2024. The Big 12 hasn't had divisions since 2010.

Part of the motivation for ending divisional play is a conference's hope to get multiple teams in the College Football Playoff when it expands to 12 teams in 2024.

Starting next year, those arguing for a better way to match the two best teams in the Big Ten title game will get their wish when the top two teams in the standings meet.

"It was absolutely part of the conversation," Kerry Kenny, the Big Ten's chief operating officer, said of addressing the East-West imbalance in the new schedules.

This isn't to say that it's impossible for the Gophers to get to the Big Ten championship game. The strides the program has made under coach P.J. Fleck — an 11-2 record and top-10 national finish in 2019 and back-to-back nine-win seasons in 2021 and '22 — show that it's within reach.

Still, the task will be more difficult without divisions in a 16-team conference. Instead of just having to nudge their way past Wisconsin and Iowa win the West, the Gophers might have competition from the likes of Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, USC and UCLA to reach the top two in the conference.

When the Big Ten announced last summer that USC and UCLA would be joining the conference, Fleck called it a positive development. "Change is really healthy," he said. "It's a big change."

And a challenging one, too.