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The Very Big Question That The Big Ten Still Hasn't Answered For 2024 · Buckeyes TomOrrow Morning

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  Welcome to Buckeyes tomorrow morning for Tuesday, May seventh, I'm your host,
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  tom or the Akron game in one hundred and sixteen days, the game against
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  the Michigan in two hundred and seven days, depending on that, how that
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  Ohio State Michigan game shakes out in two hundred and seven days could have a
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  significant role in determining who plays for the Big Ten championship. Certainly would not
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  be the first time that was the case, but it is the first time
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  that we are at this point of the season and we have no idea how
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  the Big Ten plans to break a tie. Because there are no more divisions
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  this year. This is no longer a twelve team conference or a fourteen conference.
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  Fourteen team conference, eighteen teams this year, no divisions. It feels
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  almost inevitable that someone, you know, two teams are going to lose one
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  conference game each or two conference games each. How are they going to break
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  that tie? Well, as an article from John Wilner of Pac twelve Hotline
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  reported on Monday, the Big Ten, well they haven't quite figured all that
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  out, all those details just yet, but Tony Gernaman, Tony, they've
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  got over two hundred days until the Ohio State Michigan game, and when you
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  would you need to make these decisions on breaking ties? Tony, what's the
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  rush? They've already figured out how how much TV money they're getting. Why
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  do you need to worry about little things like breaking ties for conference championship?
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  Yeah, you don't want to rush into anything. You would to have all
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  of the information possible. Do you want to be able to make the most
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  educated decision on how you're going to move forward. I wouldn't be shocked time
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  if we see the old school Big Ten rule of hey, you made the
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  playoffs last year, you can't go this year. Yeah, we are moving
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  barefully into the future. But the no repeat rule returning probably not, Boy,
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  I don't think that would go over real well if they brought back.
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  And just in case you're wondering what he's talking about, way back in the
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  day, they used to if you went to the Rose Bowl. One year
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  you won the Big Ten, you went to the Rose Bowl. The next
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  year you went to the Rose Bowl, you were not allowed to go to
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  the Rose Bowl the following years. In nineteen sixty eight, Ohisted wins the
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  national championship, they went to the Rose Bowl, beat usc and OJ Simpson.
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  The next year, in nineteen sixty nine, if they had beat Michigan
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  and finished their season with a perfect regular season record, that was it.
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  That would have been the season they would have won the national championship because they
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  were not eligible to go to the rose Ball the next year. That rule
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  has been gone for a while. How are they going to break ties this
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  year? Well, that is an open question. This was a fascinating article
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  to me because it went into all sorts of stuff about all the different stuff
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  they've had to figure out in terms of the schedule, because eighteen teams,
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  you're playing in all sorts of you know, all four time zones, you're
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  all over the place. It said they had two hundred and sixty two different
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  versions of the schedule possible. I guess that is a testament to exactly how
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  careful and detail oriented they are being. It also feels like a little bit
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  of a testament to like, hey, this might be a little overly complicated
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  with eighteen ten teams. Yeah, overly complicated with eighteen teams. No divisions,
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  which makes things easier when you have divisions, because you have some constraints
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  there here, you're kind of setting your own constraints, and you're not trying
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  to make one program have any more difficult schedule than another. You want them
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  all in the same kind of range in terms of difficulty, which is difficult
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  when Ohio State doesn't have to play Ohio State and anybody else would, or
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  Michigan doesn't have to play Michigan. So you've got these certain level of teams
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  that can't play the hardest level of schedules necessarily because they've removed themselves from that.
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  Whereas you've got to Purdue or Indiana and you've got to make things maybe
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  a little bit easier for them and yet still make it similar to all of
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  the other schedules. So all of these different things you've got to take into
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  account, travel rivalries. The two hundred and sixty two things jumped out at
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  me like that. You can't spend too much time on that many because there
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  had to been somewhere. It's just like, we're not, you know,
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  don't even a whole patch of what about this kind of thing that we do
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  here, Like no, we'll just set those aside, but we're still going
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  to count it to make it look like we're very, very thorough. But
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  still this is not an easy thing when you're doing it for the first time
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  and you're kind of setting how things are going to go for the next what
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  five years or something like that. So the first time you're doing this,
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  I think is a really really sizable undertaking. Well, and this is one
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  of these things where with a lot of things in college football, you can
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  kind of go back and look at, hey, if we did it this
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  way, what would the last five years have looked like? And would there
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  have been a really obvious year where it's like, oh boy, that really
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  makes no sense, or oh boy, we would have really disqualified clearly the
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  best team in the league based on tiebreaker priority or whatever. This year,
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  adding four teams Oregon, Washington, USCUCLA to an already large conference, I
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  don't know how you project. Okay, well, if you if those four
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  teams had been playing in the Big Ten, here's definitely what would have happened
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  the last five years. It feels like you're kind of trying to do this
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  and it's gonna be a lot of guesswork. And the reason this is going
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  to be a challenge this year is you have eighteen teams at the conference.
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  They're playing nine conference games, you're playing more conference games than the SEC is,
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  for example, so that's certainly gonna help, but that means there are
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  eight teams in the conference that you're not playing every year, So you could
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  very easily have a two or three way tie for second place, and there's
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  no head to head between any of those teams to eliminate someone. So then
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  you get into the okay, common opponents, Okay, you know, maybe
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  it's teams above five hundred, And the whole point is they don't know what
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  they're gonna use to break those ties yet. And so not only is that
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  a big issue for the conference title game, because again there are no divisions
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  this year, so there it is no longer going to be Ohio State or
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  Michigan versus whatever sad sack team manages to scrape up nine wins out of you
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  know, the Iowa, Minnesota, Purdue kind of group. It could potentially
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  be Ohio State and Oregon and Michigan and Penn State all having one loss in
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  the conference, and then how do you break that tie? And those are
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  teams with significant national championship implications. The other piece of this tony is it's
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  not just for the top two teams the conference standings and where teams rank in
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  the conference could have a lot to do with college football playoff rankings and where
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  you know, which teams make the playoff and does does a team have an
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  opportunity to get that babeled extra data point for the committee to earn a spot
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  in the field, or are you going to end up, you know,
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  hurting your teams and having someone get left out because you screwed up your your
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  tie breakers. Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the college Football Playoff,
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  how much leeway they give themselves in these standings, because you know,
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  I went through and and in preparation for this time, I went ahead and
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  just picked all of the games for the Big Ten this year to see where
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  teams would finish, just as an exercise. And say you have a nine
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  to three Michigan that has a win over Texas, so they've got a really
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  good quality win, but they have like a loss at Washington, lost to
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  Oregon, lost to Ohio State, and somehow, in this scenario I went
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  in, Nebraska goes ten to two. Now those two teams don't play each
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  other, but Nebraska with losses to Ohio State and to USC and their best
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  win would be like Colorado, Wisconsin or Iowa. You know, Nebraska is
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  going to be head of Michigan in the Big Ten standings, But I don't
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  know that the College Football Playoff Committe would see Michigan's win over Texas and the
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  Michigan defending national title and champions and think, well, you know they're behind
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  Nebraska. Our hands are kind of tired. We've got it. We'd have
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  to go with Nebraska. So I'm interested to see how much they look at
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  that. In terms of the tie breaker. I kind of assume that the
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  Big Ten will just act as if they do with the when they'd have a
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  three way tie. You go and like, okay, what's the record against
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  everybody in a division? And now there are no divisions, so it's like
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  you've got a tie, but two teams. You just treat it as a
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  threeway tie. What's the record against the top five teams in the conference,
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  you know, something like that, and maybe go from there all the way
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  down to what's their record against this scenario to you finally get to the coin
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  flip. But kind of think that the easiest way would just be to treat
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  that head to head as a three way tie. And you just get down
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  to the first scenario that actually makes sense because it starts out with like divisions,
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  and there are no divisions, so now you've got to get down to
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  like the other division is like that. No, just break it down to
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  the they say the top six or the top five conference teams or the top
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  seven or whatever far enough to where you think you get a pretty good chance
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  of eliminating kind of that that record. But the thing is it's one loss,
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  so it's like you might you might be able to break it with that
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  tie based on that record. But again, that's why there's like six levels
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  to this thing. So I you could just at some point just go with
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  the easy answer. We're gonna let the CFP decide, you know, where
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  things stand. And we've seen that with the with the Big Twelve doing that
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  a few years back, where it's like, yeah, we'd rather you'd rather
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  not stick our nose in there. We'll just let somebody else tell us who
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  won. I do like the fact that your scenario is what happens if Michigan
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  and Nebraska are really close, Tony, they just split. They just share
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  the College Football Playoff breath. We've seen it. There's President to college football
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  history. I'm sure it can happen again. The fun thing about this and
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  I'm using fun, and I'm honestly not sure if I really mean it is
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  like actual fun or just kind of like, well, this is going to
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  be interesting and possibly a disaster. Is all of these things are changing this
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  year, Like sure, yeah they don't know what the tiebreaker is, and
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  yeah, it's going to potentially play a role in the college football Playoff,
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  and yeah it's going to be a new college football playoff, and yeah,
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  there's no longer as many power conference teams as there are power conferences as used
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  to be, and all of this stuff is all changing at once, and
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  the SEC has its own I'm sure issues. I have not seen an SEC
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  tiebreaker scenario yet. I'm not sure if they have one or not. Maybe
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  they will, maybe they won't. But you've got all these new teams in
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  the SEC. You've got all these new teams in the Big Ten, the
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  Big twelve, usadded people callen Stanford or in the ACC for some reason,
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  and you got this new expanded playoff. This is just gonna be a wild
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  year. I feel like you kind of go into a lot of college football
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  seasons feeling like, you know, sometimes you're right something that's wrong, but
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  it's like, these are gonna be the four teams in the playoff, and
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  this is how it's gonna go, and you kind of yeah, yeah,
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  I sort of know what's gonna I have no idea what to expect this year,
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  because yeah, you know, certain teams are gonna be good, but
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  there are so many different things that we've never seen before, and all these
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  things are changing at once. I think I think I really mean the word
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  fun in the traditional sense of fun when I say this is gonna be fun
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  this year. I'm pretty sure I mean it. But this is gonna be
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  fun this year. Fun if you're the kind of person that likes to keep
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  score a baseball game. That kind of fun. Because I feel like when
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  we get the Phil Steel magazine, you're gonna be looking like where is this
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  team now? Like forget the players, that's another topic, like where is
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  this team that SMU and here? And I didn't even realize all of these
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  teams were in the ACC. But I mean, you could have another show
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  entirely on like guess where the quarterback is now? And see how how you
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  do, And you're going to have to make that a game show, a
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  weekly game show in terms of a now where is this quarterback? Like the
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  Kwan Finn at Baylor? Now, like a lot of that stuff is going
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  to be really fun to watch at that point it and it's kind of disappointing
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  times to see like it's Alito lose a very good player. But then it's
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  like, yeah, but now he's he's gonna be in a a bigger opportunity.
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  Uh, new face isn't as I always say, that's the best thing
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  about college football, the new faces every year. Now, not necessarily the
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  same face on new teams every year, but you know, you know,
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  you only get the same team in college football once. It's oh it's different
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  every single year now more than ever. Yes, go ahead and grab a
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  scorecard, keep score at home, because it's the you know, you get
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  a program wherever you go, and you can look at it like I remember
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  this guy on Michigan State last year, and now I'm watching him play or
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  Ohio State or for Nebraska wherever. And remember the player that you're booing tomorrow
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  you could be cheering for the next day. It is a wild time with
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  players and teams and college football playoff scenarios and all that kind of stuff changing
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  seemingly every time you do look. Someone's in a different spot, someone's playing
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  somewhere different, some team is playing in a different league. Yeah, former
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  Toledo quarterback to Kwan Finn will end up playing I assume Arizona State and Utah
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  and sure, why not in the Big twelve? Absolutely? Why not?
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  Sure? Welcome to twenty twenty four where the rules are made up and the
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  points don't matter. That is college football this year. It is going to
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  be a whole heck of a lot of fun. Will be following all that
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  for you at Buckeheadle dot com. This is a great week. We are
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  running that annual membership sale right now. This is a great week. If
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  you have not jumped on that deal already, this is the time to do
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  it. Kevin and Mark are doing their Southern swing right now. They just
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  met with David Sanders, five star offensive lineman, top offensive lineman in the
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  class of twenty twenty five. He just made a surprise visit to Ohio State
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  over the weekend, and Mark and Kevin made a visit with him on Monday.
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  Really really good interest interview. There lots of information inside information for you
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  at bucke huddle dot com on that and what is certainly heating up as one
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  of the potential biggest targets for Ohio State in the class of twenty twenty five.
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  Great insight, great analysis in those guys on the huddle board, presented
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  by Jeff Rubys Steakhouse all at bucke huddle dot com. We hope to see
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  you there. That'll do it for today. Thank you guys all for joining
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  us. Have a great day. We'll talk Jit tomorrow.