Listen, this is dumb, but not totally unsurprising. I can see playing Ohio St., since we haven't played them since 2010. I can also see playing Michigan, because we have a trophy game with them, and years ago had a rivalry with them. But if you use either of those categories (frequency of play or affinity/rivalry) as your main scheduling criteria then we should only play one of those teams. That said, MN is about last on the priority list for the Big 10, so it's not surprising to see us get screwed.
That said, Minnesota is a winner in home field advantage for our series with Iowa. Because of quirks in how they flipped home & away and now flipped it back, we get an extra home game with Iowa. The paired years were 2009/2010, 2011/2012, etc. So if you look at that, the extra singleton year is 2013 when we play Iowa at home. Then we start a new set of paired years in 2014/2015. So we get an extra home game with Iowa! As others have pointed out - we play them at TCF 4 years out of 5. Here's the history:
Iowa series:
MN home: even years from 2050 to 2010, odd years from 2011 to 2013, even years from 2014 to ???
Are they still going to do paired years started in 2016? If so, that's fine I guess, but I thought they wanted to ensure each player could play every team in the conference over a 4 year span? With paired years, you'd only see 6 of 7 in 4 years. And how does parity-based play into it? If parity-based is dominant, you could end up never playing a team in the other half again.
