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The Big Ten Conference has officially announced its 18 game league schedule for the 2017-18 season, and now comes the time to follow the same routine as we do every year. Thanks to the dynamic of 14 teams playing 18 games, now comes the time to start analyzing which Big Ten schools received a beneficial schedule and which ones did not.
Find out where we will play each #B1G opponent this year! Date/Time/TV will follow at later date #iubb ⚪️
— Indiana Basketball (@IndianaMBB) July 31, 2017
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Each team in the Big Ten has to face eight opponents only once, and five opponents twice. Four of the single matchup opponents will be at home, while the other four will be on the road.
Indiana’s opponents are the following:
Single Play in Bloomington: Maryland, Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue
Single Play on the Road: Michigan, Nebraska, Rutgers, Wisconsin
Home-and-Home: Illinois, Iowa, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State
The biggest and most obvious gripe with this schedule has to be the lack of a Home-and-Home matchup with Purdue, but the Big Ten plans to solve this issue in the future.
According to Indiana’s press release, this will likely be the last season that IU and Purdue will meet only once in the regular season as Big Ten Athletic Directors voted in May to protect rivalries such as IU/Purdue, Michigan/Michigan State and Northwestern/Illinois from playing just once in the regular season.
In addition to all of this, the Big Ten schedule is slightly unique this year due to the 2018 Big Ten Tournament being played a week at Madison Square Garden. This will result in each team now playing two conference games in the first week of December.