Big Ten COO Talks Fitting UCLA and USC Into Big Ten Scheduling

We don’t know everything about USC’s football schedules in 2024 and 2025. The specific dates for the matchups will be announced later this year. But we certainly now know enough to officially get excited about the Trojans’ move to the Big Ten and what it will do to USC’s home and away schedules.

On Thursday, the Big Ten announced all of the conference matchups for the 2024 and 2025 seasons. USC will play all of the Big Ten teams at least once in those two years. The Trojans will take on Penn State, UCLA and Wisconsin twice. USC will host Michigan, Iowa and Nebraska. And there will be road trips to Ohio State, Northwestern and Minnesota.

Putting together this schedule was a serious undertaking. It’s the first year with a Conference Championship Game that the Big Ten will operate without divisions. And the conference had to work out fitting two California teams in with their travel requirements. Big Ten Chief Operating Officer Kerry Kenny spoke during the schedule unveiling show on the Big Ten Network about what went into specifically working UCLA and USC into the mix.

“We obviously wanted to acknowledge and learn about their history and their preferences,” Kenny said of the Bruins and Trojans. “Obviously, walking into the big 10 and competing against our current 14 members is an exciting opportunity. Every time one of our teams goes out to play in the historic Rose Bowl, in the iconic LA Coliseum, it’s going to feel like a special big event that first time and hopefully every other time after that.”

While USC and UCLA fans are undoubtedly looking forward to visiting some venues the Trojans and Bruins haven’t seen in decades, if ever, the trip to Los Angeles will be a huge one for fans of the various Big Ten teams. Kenny said Los Angeles is home to the largest Big Ten alumni base outside of the conference footprint.

But how the travel will work for the Los Angeles teams has been a talking point since they announced they were joining the conference. Kenny said they listened to the Los Angeles schools talk about the weather throughout the season, their ticket packages and how the Pac-12 schedules have worked out in the past.

“What we really tried to do was balance geography in two ways,” he said. “Obviously, for our current 14 institutions, wanted to have everybody play in the LA market, either at USC or UCLA as quickly as possible. And do that in a way that we were able to get their fan bases used to going out there and playing those games.

“On the reverse side of things, we wanted to make sure that we balanced to the extent that we could, the travel to the eastern time zone and the central time zone for USC and UCLA, where all five of their opponents in a given year on the road weren’t going to be their five longest trips of that season or potentially any season,” Kenny said. “So balancing how many times they played Eastern and Central and then obviously they play one another, back and forth through this process. Those were a lot of the conversations that went into it, but we couldn’t be more excited to welcome both of those programs into the fold with this 2024 season.”

USC will take three trips to the Eastern Time Zone in 2024. The Trojans will visit Maryland, Penn State and Purdue. The Central Time Zone trip is to Northwestern.

USC gets two Central (Minnesota and Wisconsin) and two Eastern Time Zone (Ohio State and Rutgers) trips in 2025.

The good news for USC in terms of travel is that it seems in years when the Trojans or Bruins are the visiting team for the Crosstown rivalry game, that will be their fifth road game of the season. Meaning, neither team should ever have five true conference road games crisscrossing the country.