Hey, hey, where you been, but got talk is about to begin, hey, hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Welcome back to your front-end book. I talk to Douglas and Nathan Barrett and the new Big 10 schedule.

Oh, schedules are fun. Actually, they're super important, and we really need to talk about them.

Nathan Barrett, this was announced on Thursday afternoon. We didn't pod last night because I had tickets to the Guardians game, and I took my younger daughter, and it was her first Guardians game, and Jose Ramirez hit three home runs, and it was very exciting.

So I was like, look, that's their best player, and he literally just had the best game he's ever had. He had never hit three home runs before, and he made a ridiculous defensive play.

And she was like, I want popcorn. It's like, dude.

Yeah, it's funny about that. I have been to one game there when it was still Jacob's field, and Cardinals were playing the then Indians. This would have been in like maybe early 2000s, like maybe summer of 2000, 2000, 2001, and Jim Tome hit three home runs.

Oh, nice. That's the best player. Look what he just did.

So we didn't record this on Thursday afternoon, recording it Friday morning, and I think like the big 10 gave away Ohio State's juicy spots.

I like everything I thought was going to happen. It's like, oh, here comes USC and UCLA. How do you do this? And then big 10 was like, yeah, no, we're going to do that.

It's just we're not going to do it with Ohio State. We're going to give it to Michigan. We're going to give it to Penn State. I think you guys listening have a little bit of a handle on this now.

What they announced is the 24 and 25 big 10 opponents for everybody. It is a nine game conference schedule. There are no divisions. There are 11 protected rivalries, and it varies by team.

Ohio State Michigan is protected. That's the only one protected for Ohio State. Michigan Michigan State is also protected.

So Michigan has two protected rivalries and protected rivalry means you play that team every year. Penn State has none. Iowa has three.

So one of the big things Nathan's that Ohio State Penn State will not be played every year. I went through this is what I wanted to do.

We had had previous a previous version like two years ago before USC and UCLA were added to the big 10. We knew they're coming in 24.

They put out a schedule. So I looked at what the old Ohio State 24 25 schedule was and what the new opponents are to get a cumulative effect of here's the changes.

It's not just moving stuff around. Maybe there's an unaway home flip. It's actual new opponents. What does this new big 10 mean for Ohio State?

And that's what I want to talk about sort of holistically. Is it better or is it what's the word not better because there are there are some moving parts here.

But I do think it's worth starting. Is it not with the fact that Ohio State Penn State is not a protected rivalry.

This is something that you had reported was on Gene Smith radar. We had had a lot of discussions around this trying to predict this.

I think we did it like a prediction pod on this. I think we kind of had arrived at a point where we may be expected it makes sense to not have everybody have the same number of rivalries that everyone has won everyone has to.

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