Here’s How the Big Ten Could End in a 9-Way Tie in 2024

It's a new age of college football. With all of the conference realignments tacking onto the expansion of the College Football Playoff, the 2024 season is primed to be a new experience for fans everywhere.

We're in uncharted and untested territory. Something crazy is bound to happen.

Four solid programs have joined an already strong Big Ten conference. The age of undefeated programs may be at an end with so much quality competition. Fans and experts in large majority wholly expect the best teams to have one or two losses.

With that in mind, two-loss teams in the Big Ten could produce a chaotic end to the regular season.

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The Big Ten did away with divisions with the addition of Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington. Instead, the two best teams from the conference will meet in Indianapolis for the Big Ten Championship. This means Michigan and Ohio State could feasibly play in back-to-back weeks with wildly different stakes.

But that's not even the craziest possible outcome for the Big Ten. While it's incredibly unlikely, it's not impossible that the Big Ten could end the regular season with a 9-way tie for first place.

Gopher Insight, a Minnesota Golden Gophers X account, posted a hypothetical conference standings graphic in which nine Big Ten teams finished with a 10-2 record and a nearly perfect tie for 1st place.

The most likely way for the 9-way tie to happen is how it is displayed in the graphic with each team needing to lose specific conference games while winning all of their non-conference games.

Of course, the tweet (or post, whatever) was largely made in jest. Again, it's not impossible, but Rutgers, Nebraska and Minnesota are not likely to win 10 games.

However, it does present another situation worth pondering and that's the even more probable scenario in which there is a three or four-way tie for first at the end of the season.

The Big Ten no doubt has a plan in place for tiebreakers in such a scenario, no matter how unbelievably chaotic the standings may end up being; though they have yet to be shared publicly.