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By Jim Caltagirone
For the Mirror
As the Big Ten Conference and SEC prepare for expansion to 16 teams for the 2024 college football season, originality and creativity may ultimately dictate the shape of team schedules.
The SEC recently announced that it has adopted a temporary eight-game conference schedule for 2024 and scrapped divisions.
The Big Ten just confirmed on Thursday that it is sticking with nine games and will scrap its two-division format. The addition of USC and UCLA adds more glamour and opportunities to the schedule.
The SEC identifies one permanent opponent and seven rotating opponents.
With a 12-team playoff also only one year away, conference and school officials across the country are grappling with the challenge of maintaining competitive balance within the conference and preserving traditional rivalries while ensuring that strength of schedule is an advantage and not a liability in the playoff selection process.
Penn State was an independent in football before joining the Big Ten in 1993, but it would have been easy for a casual observer to conclude that the annual meetings with Boston College, Maryland, Pitt, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple and West Virginia constituted conference play.
In the last decade of independence, Penn State posted a record of 54-10-2 against those seven opponents. Six of the 10 losses were during the 1987 and 1988 seasons.
The only member of the group to beat Penn State three times during the decade was Pitt.
From 1989-92, the Nittany Lions were 24-1-1 against their quasi-conference foes.
If that's not exactly annihilation, it's at least domination.
Time will tell if USC and UCLA and Texas and Oklahoma become instant powerhouses in the Big Ten and SEC, respectively.
Penn State won a Big Ten title outright in its second season of membership, but has yet to match the level of superiority that it sustained over Eastern opponents.
The Nittany Lions have lost at least two conference games in 26 of their 30 seasons in the Big Ten.
The product of the evolution of the super conference in college football will likely be parity.
The already punishing gauntlet of the SEC regular season will only be exacerbated by the entry of Texas and Oklahoma into the fray.
The three-loss team that makes it into the 12-team playoff may become the rule rather than the exception, especially if the three losses are by a handful of points to the likes of Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma.
If not for the financial windfall from conference championship games, consideration might be given to eliminating a postseason game that hurts, rather than enhances, the chances of multiple teams advancing from the same conference to the playoffs.
In the future, the playoff bubble teams from the non-Power 5 conferences will likely benefit most from competing in conference championship games.
In recent years, perhaps no major sport has been more proactive in adapting the game to meet fan needs and interests than Major League Baseball.
While the spotlight this season has been on the new pitch clock, a major modification was made to the schedule.
The number of divisional games for each team decreased from 76 to 52 and the number of inter-league games was increased from 20 to 46. For the first time, each team will play at least three games against every other MLB team.
MLB contends that the new format expands fan exposure to the game's star players and new opponents.
For Penn State football fans, the hope is that the novelty of conference expansion westward will not induce a longing for the days of Eastern domination.
Jim Caltagirone resides in Altoona. He is a regular contributor to Voice of the Fan.