Big Ten Announces New Procedures for Football Game Breaking

OFFICIAL EQUAL START PROCEDURES

ROSEMONT, Illinois (August 26, 2024) — The Big Ten Conference announced new tiebreaking procedures in football Monday for the 2024 Discover Big Ten Championship Game, the first in Big Ten history to pair the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the conference standings.

If two teams are tied in the Big Ten standings (conference games only), the following steps will be followed until a decision is made (condensed version below with full version listed here):

1. Tied teams will be compared based on head-to-head matches during the regular season.
2. Tied teams will be compared based on their records against all common conference opponents.
3. Tied teams will be compared based on their record against common opponents with the best conference record and proceeding through common conference opponents based on their order of finish in the conference standings.
4. Tied teams will be compared based on the best cumulative conference winning percentage of all conference opponents.
5. The representative will be selected based on the highest ranking established by SportSource Analytics (a measure of the team’s rating score) after the regular season.
6. The representative will be chosen by drawing lots among the tied teams, carried out by the commissioner or his delegate.

For more information, including the process for teams tied at three or more, click here.

The 2024 Discover Big Ten Championship Game will be held on Saturday, December 7 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis and will be broadcast for the first time on CBS. The winner will represent the conference as an automatic qualifier (AQ) for the College Football Playoff.

The Big Ten football season kicks off this weekend with all 18 teams in action, with three games on Thursday night, two on Friday, 12 on Saturday and one on Sunday. The 2024 campaign will be the first to feature a full schedule of Big Ten games across three broadcast networks (CBS, FOX, NBC) with the support of exclusive cable and streaming coverage all season on Big Ten Network, FS1 and Peacock.