Big Ten Schedule Thoughts

Photo: joseph cress

The Big Ten schedule is out for 2025-26 and everything is fairly vanilla culminating with the conference championships hosted by Penn State. I’m sure the tournament will be a tough ticket like everything hosted at Penn State. If you have never been to a tournament, it’s a lot of fun. The Saturday night semifinals and wrestlebacks are a fantastic session.

Friday night and Sunday afternoon are your typical match times. The Big Ten has experimented with some Monday duals, but it appears that will not happen this season.

There are four Saturday duals with times to be determined. There were a few Saturday afternoon duals last year which about caused me to glitch out. 99% of college wrestling’s audience is at tournaments on Saturday afternoons so hosting a dual then is incredibly confusing. There are arguments for school, travel and arena availability but when there are March Madness basketball games on Thursdays at 10pm eastern I have a tough time believing altruism won the day.

If you haven’t noticed or maybe don’t read Barstool, mid-week football games from the MAC conference have great popularity. It just simply makes sense that people who live near Bowling Green and Central Michigan are probably more concerned with Ohio State and Michigan games respectively. The last I knew, people park at Eastern Michigan for Michigan home football games. The MAC brilliantly moved games to not compete with Saturday Power five and NFL Sundays to mid-week. Now “Maction” is a brand that has succeeded. Why Wrestling doesn’t do something similar on Tuesday nights is beyond me.

The Big Ten has 14 teams total and each of them wrestle 8 conference duals. There are years where some powers don’t wrestle each other. Many years ago Cael and Brands communicated over twitter so Penn State and Iowa wrestled a “non-conference” dual as it was silly the #1 and #2 teams weren’t going to wrestle. None of the powers have it “easy”. Penn State wrestles Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio State, Michigan and Rutgers so those teams quietly running the table is out of the picture barring Cael having an issue with impetigo or something. That slate is somewhat eyebrow raising if you like conspiracies or just smart scheduling for network purposes.

The winner of Minnesota and Illinois would be the team to look at as possibly sweeping their duals. However, Illinois would still have to get past Nebraska and Michigan. Minnesota has Nebraska, Iowa and Ohio State. All considered, Penn State would probably be sitting at negative 500 odds to win the regular season dual title without sharing it.