In 2026, the Big Ten will celebrate its 130th anniversary, and it will accordingly have to reckon with just how much it has diverged from its historical core.
The wealthiest college athletic conference ever to exist was founded in 1896, at the Chicago Loop's still-standing Palmer House hotel. From those quasi-humble origins sprang a behemoth—an 18-team circuit with tentacles from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Through it all, the league has had to balance contradictory instincts: a sincere devotion to the importance of academia, an occasionally self-defeating avarice and a tragicomic sense of cognitive dissonance that ties those two values together. In this way, the league has acted as a funhouse mirror for America—and the up-and-down Midwest region more specifically.
With this in mind, here's a look back at how the league has changed since its long-ago genesis.
1896: The Early Years
The Big Ten's original football lineup consisted of Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue and Wisconsin (Lake Forest, now a Division III school, sent a delegation to the Palmer House but opted against joining the league). From there, the group fluctuated in membership for two decades, with Indiana, Iowa and Ohio State coming and going. All the while, its football teams began to win prodigiously, with the Maroons and Wolverines snagging national championships and forging a closely-followed rivalry.
1917: 10 at Last
Ahead of the 1906 season, the Big Ten's universities—seeking to regain the upper hand in a growing war between the league's academic and athletic missions—introduced new rules seeking, among other changes, to cap the number of games teams could play at five. That did not sit well with Michigan, the league's most successful program, and it responded by leaving the conference from 1907 to '16. Its return in 1917 created the league's classic lineup.
1940: Marooned
The Big Ten flourished throughout the 1920s, the so-called "Golden Age of Sports;" Illinois won two football national championships and benefitted from the popularity of running back Red Grange. However, in-state foe Chicago began to waver on its commitments to big-time football, thanks to the renegade views of new president Robert Maynard Hutchins. After a 2–6 campaign in 1939 that included an 85–0 loss to the No. 6 Wolverines, the Maroons exited the world of big-time football forever, ending the league's gridiron presence in the city of its foundation.
1953: Down on the Farm
After weathering the war decade as the Big Nine, the conference welcomed a new face in Michigan State—an agricultural-research powerhouse exploding in size amid a booming economy. Coach Biggie Munn's football team entered the conference on a 26–1 three-year heater, and immediately went 9–1 and won the Rose Bowl. The 1950s and 1960s would prove a golden age for the Spartans, who aggressively embraced integration as the postwar struggle for civil rights shook the region and country.
1993: Brave New World
The Big Ten of 1953 to '92 is the one most familiar to those alive today—the Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and elder millennials who saw the league beamed across America via the then-new innovation of television. In 1984, the court case NCAA v. Oklahoma stripped its plaintiff of most control over college football on TV. With new money flowing into college sports, the Big Ten was incentivized to add a new team; Penn State, a football-first research factory in Central Pennsylvania with two national titles in the 1980s, fit the bill.
2011: Television, the Drug of the Nation
As the calendar turned to the 21st century, optimization and consolidation ruled the day in college football as in American life. Conference realignment killed off hyper-regional leagues like the Southwest Conference, while the Bowl Championship Series united major college football in crowning (theoretically) a single champion for the first time. Flush with cash from its first-of-its-kind cable network, the Big Ten poached Nebraska from the Big 12 ahead of the 2011 season; this 12-team lineup resulted in the inauguration of the league's football championship game, first won by Wisconsin in '11.
2014: So You've Decided to Steal Cable
Not content with the addition of one of the most successful football programs of the past 50 years, the Big Ten tacked on two new members according to the cold logic of television market expansion (it is not a coincidence that basic-cable viewership hit its approximate peak in '14). Maryland and Rutgers joined the league, giving the Big Ten headway in Washington and New York; in the former's case, the Terrapins severed a six-decade ACC affiliation to jump ship. In football, the league adopted regional divisions, only for the East to quickly dominate the West as the College Football Playoff and national recruiting encouraged stratification. The Terrapins and Scarlet Knights could only watch as Marylanders and New Jerseyans like Dwayne Haskins and Jabrill Peppers starred for the Buckeyes and Wolverines.
2024: Into the West
During the COVID-19 pandemic, conventional wisdom held that the disruption would make college athletics as a whole more financially gun-shy (how silly we were, in hindsight, to ignore the lessons of the World Wars). Nope! Shocking the country, USC and UCLA agreed to join the league in June 2022; Oregon and Washington followed suit in 2023. Results have run a wide gamut so far—the Ducks won the conference in their first football season, while the Bruins are staring down one of their worst-ever gridiron campaigns in 2025. Most importantly, all involved are very, very rich, and the '26 Big Ten men's basketball tournament will be played in Las Vegas—1,752 miles from the Palmer House.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Big Ten Expansion History: Looking Back at Every Major Change to the Conference.
