2025 College Football Analysis, Part Four: Big Ten Championship Scenarios

In the previous installment of this series, we explored the strengths of schedule for all 18 Big Ten teams, the odds for each team to win any number of conference and overall games, and I introduced the odds matrix for various end of season results. For reference, that matrix is repeated below as Table 1.

Table 1: Summary of the preseason projections for the Big Ten conference, based on the consensus preseason rankings and a 50,000 cycle Monte Carlo simulation of the full college football season.

Today, it is time to dig deeper into the data shown in Table 1. The plan is to explore the various scenarios that are most likely to play out in the 2025 Big Ten football season.

Overall, the simulation results suggest that there are four primary Big Ten contenders. All of them have at least a 10% chance to win the conference and a 30% chance to make the College Football Playoff. No. 2 Penn State (25%) has slightly better odds than No. 3 Ohio State (23%) to win the conference. No. 8 Oregon (15%) and No. 12 Michigan (12%) are the other two primary contenders.

There is a 1-in-4 chance that a team other than the four teams listed above will wind up claiming the Big Ten title. The most likely dark horse contenders are No. 21 Illinois (6%), No. 22 Indiana (4.3%), No. 25 USC (4%) and No. 30 Nebraska (3%). The remaining 10 teams combined have less than an 8% chance to win the conference.

Two other tidbits from Table 4 are that the expected number of Big Ten teams to earn a playoff bid is 2.74 teams and the odds for a Big Ten team to win the national title is 28%.

Big Ten Championship Scenarios

Table 1 provides the raw odds for Big Ten glory, but more insight can be gained by exploring some of the most likely scenarios that will likely impact the Big Ten race. First, let's look at the set of Big Ten games where one of the primary contenders has a game with one of the other four primary contenders. It turns out there are only three of these games in the 2025 Big Ten regular season:

• Sept. 27: Oregon at Penn State (-7.5)

• Nov. 1: Penn State at Ohio State (-3)

• Nov. 29: Ohio State at Michigan (+2)

Interestingly, the projected two best teams in the Big Ten (Penn State and Ohio State) both have two games against the other primary contenders, including a game against each other on Nov. 1. The other primary contenders (Oregon and Michigan) each only play only one of the other primary contenders.

If the currently projected favorites were to win every Big Ten game, Ohio State would clinch the No. 1 seed in the Big Ten Championship game with a 9-0 conference record and wins over Penn State and Michigan. This is the "most likely" set of projected records in Table 1.

In this scenario, the Buckeyes would likely face Penn State (8-1) in the Big Ten Championship Game as the Nittany Lions would likely win the tiebreaker with Oregon (8-1) and Michigan (8-1) due to a stronger conference strength of schedule. The tiebreaker would default to the combined conference records of the tied teams' conference opponents and the conference strength of schedule mirrors this data set.

While this is the single most likely scenario, it is also very unlikely that the conference race will play out in exactly this manner. In my disruptive scenario, I assume that there is a historically reasonable number of road upsets overall.

The key assumption in the disruptive scenario is that upsets are most likely to happen when strong teams are narrow favorites on the road against slightly weaker teams. In the list of games above, Ohio State would get upset on the road at Michigan.

In order to look for other potentially disruptive games, the list below shows the set of games where the primary contenders face a secondary contender and/or a primary contender has a game with a projected spread under 10 points.