With their summer 2022 joint declaration of intent to leave the Pacific-12 Conference in 2024, Los Angeles-based rivals UCLA and Southern California began a groundswell that fundamentally changed the college football landscape.
The two programs hope to find stable footing as they begin competing in the Big Ten this season. The first two newcomers in the Big Ten’s Western expansion, which also includes Oregon and Washington with their Pac-12 exits announced in August 2023, add the nation’s second-largest media market and brand recognition to the conference.
The promise of high-profile matchups fueled the move to expand the Big Ten from coast to coast, a topic that first-year UCLA Coach DeShaun Foster touched on at Wednesday’s edition of Big Ten media days in Indianapolis.
“That’s why we’re excited for the Big Ten, just getting opportunities to play in a lot of stadiums that you usually wouldn’t get an opportunity to,” he said when asked about the Bruins traveling to Penn State’s Beaver Stadium for the first meeting of the two programs since 1968.
Initial intrigue is undeniable as fresh as the pairings will be. But the ability of UCLA and USC to compete with, and not merely play against, the upper echelon of the Big Ten is a hot topic upon their introduction to the league.
The Bruins and Trojans left the Pac-12 with 54 combined conference football championships—but just one during the College Football Playoff era. USC’s 2017 Pac-12 title was its first since 2008 and the program’s last of 37 claimed since 1927. UCLA joins its new conference in a quarter-century league-championship drought, last finishing atop the Pac-12 in 1998.
They Bruins and Trojans will now contend with such programs as Penn State, which has finished ranked in the top 12 six times since 2016—and never qualified for the College Football Playoff as a result of other Big Ten members’ dominance.
The four-team Playoff era opened and closed with Big Ten heavyweights Ohio State and Michigan claiming national championships, an accomplishment that eluded the Pac-12 as a whole every season after USC won its last in 2004.
The Trojans went 11–1 during the 2022 regular season, their first under Coach Lincoln Riley. Losses to Utah in the Pac-12 Championship Game and Tulane in the Cotton Bowl, however, set the tone for a disappointing 2023. USC lost its last three games of the regular season to head to the Holiday Bowl unranked, and 2022 Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams exited without a team title.
USC’s sour end to 2022 and middling final season in the Pac-12 generated plenty of buzz around college football media, which Riley addressed in Indianapolis.
“That’s part of being at USC,” Riley said. “It’s part of being a blue-blood program. ... It’s always going to be talked about, and you either want to be in programs like that or you don’t.”
USC opens its inaugural Big Ten slate with one of the conference’s marquee matchups, as the Trojans travel to Ann Arbor, Mich., to face reigning national champion Michigan. The Sept. 21 clash marks the first meeting between the two at the venerable Big House since a 20–19 Wolverines win in 1958.
UCLA begins Big Ten play on Sept. 14 when it hosts Indiana at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., in an unintentional reminder that the additions of Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington also have noteworthy impacts on other sports. The Bruins own the most national championships in men’s basketball, and the Hoosiers are tied for fifth on that list.
Neither of the Los Angeles programs face Ohio State in their first year of Big Ten competition, denying UCLA a reunion with former Coach Chip Kelly. Kelly left the Bruins after going 35–34 in six seasons from 2018 through 2023, taking the offensive coordinator’s post with the Buckeyes.
Kelly’s departure for Ohio State reunites him with Buckeyes Coach Ryan Day, a former University of New Hampshire quarterback whom Kelly coached at the turn of the millennium.
“I trust Chip with my life,” Day said. “And that’s a big part of any time you are handing something over like that, that you have done almost your entire career.”
While Kelly will not see his former UCLA team, he will return to Autzen Stadium and the University of Oregon on Oct. 12 in a matchup of teams with Playoff designs. Kelly left New Hampshire in 2007 to become the Ducks’ offensive coordinator, then took over for Mike Bellotti as head coach in 2009.
Kelly went 46–7 in four seasons at Oregon, helping the program ascend to the national stage—and in the process, perhaps paving the way for its eventual addition to the Big Ten.
