Analysis: Penn State receives difficult schedule in first year of new Big Ten era
The addition of Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten for the 2024-2025 academic year has required some adjustments for the conference. It released the future opponents for each football team in June but has had to reconfigure with two new teams joining for next season.
On Thursday, the Big Ten announced the new list of future opponents and rivals for each team — including Penn State — for the next five years.
Let’s take a look at how the Nittany Lions will be impacted.
Brutal 2024 schedule
Penn State will have one of its best teams of the James Franklin era next season, which is good news because the schedule for the Nittany Lions is shaping up to be an incredibly difficult one. Gone are Michigan State, Northwestern, Nebraska, Indiana and Rutgers — teams they were originally slated to face next year. In their stead is a gauntlet that features some of the best teams in the conference. They will take on Ohio State, UCLA, Washington, Illinois and Maryland in Beaver Stadium — two of the current top seven teams in the country and an always-talented UCLA team — but the difficult games won’t just be at home.
They’ll also head to Los Angeles to take on USC and Madison to take on Wisconsin, along with road matchups with pesky opponents in Purdue and Minnesota. It’s inevitable that teams will face difficult schedules given the depth of the conference with the four new West Coast teams, but it’s tough to imagine a more difficult group of opponents to open the new Big Ten age.
No annual rival
This was true in the last schedule release and remains true now — Penn State does not have a protected rivalry game moving forward. That means no yearly matchups with any team and it could lead to multiple years between games against teams the Nittany Lions have gotten used to playing on an annual basis.
The two most notable opponents that matter are Michigan and Ohio State. The Buckeyes will travel to State College in 2024 and host Penn State in 2025, but the teams won’t meet again until 2028 when they return to Pennsylvania. Penn State’s matchup with the Wolverines this November in Beaver Stadium will be the last game between the two teams until 2026, when they will host the Nittany Lions in Ann Arbor before making a return trip in 2027. Those games that fans have been accustomed to were already going to be less frequent in the previous iteration of the schedule, but now they will seemingly have two-year rotation cycles that will surely take some of the meaning out of what became annual matchups.
Yearly west coast trips
One of the new quirks of having four West Coast teams in the Big Ten means each team will travel to the other side of the country for a game every season. That will guarantee Penn State makes its first conference trip to Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington within the next four years. The Nittany Lions will head to the California schools first, traveling to USC in 2024 and UCLA in 2025, before visiting the northwest schools, taking on Washington in 2026 and Oregon in 2027.
Those trips will undoubtedly be difficult for players who will have to adjust their body clocks on short notice in the middle of the semester — but will present opportunities for fans to potentially visit stadiums they haven’t seen the Nittany Lions play in before.
Here is the full list of opponents for Penn State moving forward:
2024
Home: Illinois, Maryland, Ohio State, UCLA, Washington
Away: Minnesota, Purdue, USC, Wisconsin
2025
Home: Indiana, Nebraska, Northwestern, Oregon
Away: Iowa, Michigan State, Ohio State, Rutgers, UCLA
2026
Home: Minnesota, Purdue, Rutgers, USC, Wisconsin
Away: Maryland, Michigan, Northwestern, Washington
2027
Home: Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Washington
Away: Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, Purdue, Wisconsin
2028
Home: Indiana, Iowa, Ohio State, Oregon, UCLA
Away: Michigan State, Nebraska, Rutgers, USC
