The Big Ten football schedule for 2024 and 2025 is being updated now that the league is adding Oregon and Washington beginning next year.

Previously, the league had announced a “Flex Protect Plus” model in June that included 11 protected rivalry games every season. In that model, some teams have 3 rivalries while others — mainly Penn State — have zero.

In a Thursday article with ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg, the B1G’s chief operating officer Kerry Kenny updated the process of re-working the matchups for 2024 and 2024. Kenny says the league is “days, if not weeks” away from announcing the home-and-home opponents for 2024.

Overall, the B1G is looking to keep the core principles of the “Flex Protect Plus” model, and Kenny confirmed Oregon vs. Washington will be the 12th protected annual matchup in the conference. Other protected games could potentially be added in the new model.

As for the focus of the new scheduling system, Kerry said the focus is on access to the expanded College Football Playoff, for each team to play every team as much as possible and balancing geography impacts.

“We’re making sure that we don’t have outliers in terms of the hardest schedule or the easiest schedule for any of our teams, and working through how to balance the competitive tiers,” Kenny said. “You’re going to see a lot of what people seemingly liked with the Flex Protect Plus. We’re going through different options of what that could look like to see how we balance not just the travel component of our Eastern and Central time zone schools but also the frequency of how we can get everybody to play both at those four [West Coast] schools.”

The league certainly has a unique set of circumstances to navigate with programs stretching from Washington and California to Maryland and Rutgers on the East Coast.  We’ll see how the B1G tries to address everything, along with competitive balance, in the new model.