Today's Tidbit... Conference Scheduling and Dearest Enemies

Let me know if this sounds familiar. A college athletic conference looking to establish a plan for scheduling conference games seeks to respect longstanding rivalries while finding a way to schedule games among teams with limited history or interest in playing one another.

That may sound like the situation the Big Ten, Big 12, or ACC faces in 2023 as they create rotating schedules with protected rivalries and various forms of pods. Still, the previous sentence summarized the situation the Big Ten faced in 1927 when they first took a stab at coordinated conference scheduling.

Things were different back then because the Big Ten and other conferences were, first and foremost, geared around eligibility standards and not scheduling. The conference did not schedule the games, so Big Ten teams played one another annually or rarely. Minnesota and Wisconsin played one another every year from 1890 to 1927 (other than 1906), while Minnesota and Purdue did not meet from 1898 until 1928, a 30-year stretch against a conference foe when the league had nine or ten teams.