Oregon has made a splash in its first Big Ten season, but the other former Pac-12 teams are finding the transition far more difficult.
UCLA, USC and Washington are sitting in the bottom half of their new conference’s standings midway through the season and are a collective 4-10 in Big Ten play.
The Trojans and Bruins, the first Pac-12 teams to announce they were leaving the conference before it fell apart in realignment in the summer of 2023, have just one Big Ten win apiece.
USC (3-4, 1-4) has dropped three straight, including Saturday’s 29-28 loss at Maryland. The Trojans have led in the fourth quarter of all seven of their games.
“We’ve had a myriad of different issues,” coach Lincoln Riley said this week. “The reality is we’ve been in a lot of really close games, we’ve had some opportunities to separate in several of these games and we haven’t.
“We’ve had some opportunities to close them. We’ve had some unfortunate breaks, we’ll call them, in several of these games, but we haven’t been good enough to overcome those.”
The Trojans, who opened the season with a win against LSU in Las Vegas and were ranked as high as No. 11, have a chance to get back on track at home against Rutgers on Friday night.
Overall, Big Ten teams are 5-11 when traveling over multiple time zones. Collectively, USC, UCLA and Washington have just one conference win on the road.
The Huskies (4-3, 2-2) will visit No. 13 Indiana on Saturday in their second road game played at 9 a.m. back home.
Washington won the Pac-12 championship and reached the national championship game last season, but subsequent turnover meant this was essentially a rebuilding year. Coach Jedd Fisch, in his first year with the Huskies, knew there would be highs and lows.
“There are so many new faces, new bodies, new people playing positions they’ve never played before, in atmospheres they’ve never played, in a conference we’ve never played in,” Fisch said. “There was going to be so much new that it was going to be impossible to suggest that it was going to look too different than it is right now.”
UCLA (2-5, 1-4) snapped a five-game losing streak with a 35-32 victory at Rutgers last weekend for the Bruins’ first win in their new conference.
“I’m excited to get a Big Ten win, but we have a few more games and I would like to become bowl-eligible,” Bruins coach DeShaun Foster said. “So we’re just going to continue to play and hopefully we get there.”
Interestingly, Oregon State and Washington State, the lone remaining teams in the Pac-12 after realignment, have both defeated Big Ten opponents this season. The Beavers beat Purdue and the Cougars beat Washington.
The outlier for the new Big Ten teams is the Ducks, ranked No. 1 in the nation for the first time since 2012 entering Saturday’s home game against No. 20 Illinois and boosted by a victory two weeks ago at home over then-No. 2 Ohio State.
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“Entering this conference, there’s some new challenges that are presented,” Ducks coach Dan Lanning said before the season. “Going through the summer scouting reports, you realize some of these teams that we are going to get to play and it’s really exciting. But I’ll tell you here at Oregon, we chase and attack those challenges.”
Oregon (7-0, 4-0) got off to a shaky start in lackluster nonconference wins against Idaho and Boise State that now seem like anomalies. Last weekend the Ducks shut out Purdue 35-0 on the road.
It’s likely Oregon will figure into the expanded College Football Playoff field barring disaster.
“You don’t sit halfway through a meal and say you’re done eating when there’s still a lot of food left on the plate,” Lanning said Monday. “That’s where we’re at; we’re at the midpoint of the season. We’re not done yet. There’s a lot of things that we still want to accomplish. So (the No. 1 ranking) doesn’t really matter for us.”
