ESPN announced the lineup for the 2015 ACC-Big Ten Challenge on Wednesday, a slate of games that will assuredly be as exciting as ever. First established in 1999, the ACC-Big Ten Challenge - dominated by the ACC through its first decade, but extremely competitive since then - is a rare bird, a fun regular-season tradition that college basketball has and college football does not.
But what if college football did have an ACC-Big Ten Challenge?
There are a number of reasons why a conference vs. conference challenge could never work in football, but for now we’ll ignore every single one of those and pretend Jim Delany and John Swofford have brought the ACC-Big Ten Challenge to the gridirion for 2015 only and - in even better news - they’ve appointed CFT to put together the match-ups and the kickoff times.
With that willing suspension of disbelief out of the way, let’s make this as realistic as possible. We’ll place the Football ACC-Big Ten Challenge in Week 2 (the weekend of Sept. 10-12) with all 14 games slated for ESPN properties. Since Notre Dame is still independent in football we’ll leave them out of it; plus, it just make things easier with 14 teams in each league. We’ll stack each game with an eye toward competitiveness with the understand this is also a television event. Now, here’s how we’d stack it:
Thurs., Sept. 10
N.C. State at Northwestern - 7:30 p.m. ET, EPSNU
Penn State at Virginia Tech - 8 p.m. ET, ESPN
Fri., Sept. 11
Boston College at Rutgers - 7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN2
Michigan State at Louisville - 8 p.m. ET, ESPN
Sat., Sept. 12
Syracuse at Indiana - noon ET, ESPNU
Pittsburgh at Iowa - noon ET, ESPN2
Maryland at Virginia - noon ET, ESPN
Duke at Illinois - 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN2
Minnesota at North Carolina - 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN
Georgia Tech at Wisconsin - 3:30 p.m. ET, ABC
Purdue at Wake Forest - 7 p.m. ET, ESPNU
Nebraska at Miami - 7 p.m. ET, ESPN2
Michigan at Clemson - 7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN
Florida State at Ohio State - 8 p.m. ET, ABC
The verdict? Really juicy at the top, but man that’s a steep drop from there. Still, I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’d all sit through five Northwestern-NC States and Purdue-Wake Forests for one Florida State-Ohio State or Michigan-Clemson.
