4 ways to look at the Big Ten and NU's place in it after 4 games

Is it too early for this? Maybe, but the sample size is always too small in college football.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

An 18-team conference is unwieldy in most ways, but it’s good for one thing—dividing into thirds. So is a 12-team conference, to be fair, but in our current era when the Big Ten and SEC are expected to eat up about four of the 12 playoff bids each, three six-team tears sort of breaks along natural fault lines.

The top-six teams in the Big Ten are your legitimate playoff contenders. The middle-six are those a couple of breaks away from being in the top 25 or a few bounces from the bottom-third, which, of course, is the domain of future hot seat candidates and quick-change chasers via the transfer portal.

It might still be too early for this—always a problem with college football—but we’re a third of the way through the regular season for most teams. Thirteen of 18 Big Ten teams have played at least one conference game to this point and all but two of them, Penn State and Washington,¹ have at least played another power-conference opponent.

What have we learned about the Big Ten to this point? How’s the hierarchy forming early? Where does Nebraska fall in all of this after its first loss and a bye week to think about it?

Here are four ways to look at it.