Here's the (edited) Big Ten tiebreaker rules, in case anyone wants to know:
The Big Ten football championship will be decided by a game played between the two division champions. A team or teams that are not eligible to participate in a postseason football bowl game as a result of NCAA and/or Big Ten sanctions shall not be eligible to participate in the Big Ten...
bigten.org
If two teams are tied, the divisional winner is the
winner of the head-to-head game.
If three or more teams are tied,
follow Steps 1 through 8 (in order) until only two teams remain. Then, the
head-to-head winner between those two is divisional champ.
- Records compared based on winning percentage against the other tied teams.
- Records compared based on winning percentage within their division.
- Records compared against the next highest placed teams in their division in order of finish (#4, 5, 6, and 7).
- Records compared based on winning percentage against all common conference opponents.
- Records compared based on the best cumulative conference winning percentage of their non-divisional opponents.
- Records compared against the highest placed non-divisional teams in their division order of finish (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7).
- The team with the best overall winning percentage [excluding exempted games] shall be the representative.
- The representative will be chosen by random draw.
#5 and #6 are funky. It means that they look at your cross-over games (Big Ten East opponents, for Nebraska) and calculate their collective win/loss records (in conference). So basically, if you're in a deadlock with your own division, it's better to have played against Ohio State, Michigan, etc., than to have played against Maryland or Rutgers. Again, it's worth remembering that this really only goes that far in a 3-way tie. If you're in a 2-way tie, the head-to-head game solves this immediately.
Here's where this gets extremely odd - and even more rare.
Let's say there's 3-way tie between NU, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Each team 5-1 within the division (NU beats WI, WI beats IA, IA beats NU). Steps 1 and 2 don't break the tie, and Step 3 doesn't either since all three teams are perfect against Minny, Illinois, N'western and Purdue.
Let's say for argument's sake that in Step 4
each team played two unique Big Ten East foes (UM/MSU, OSU/PSU, MD/RU), and then we all smashed Indiana.
At Step 5, we'll say that Nebraska played (and beat) Ohio State and Penn State. Iowa beat the Two Michigans. Normally, you'd expect that one of these tiebreakers would eliminate a team (in this case, Wisconsin) and then the two prevailing teams would go back to their head-to-head record (Iowa beats Nebraska).
But in this case, assuming OSU and PSU had the best records in the East, Nebraska could essentially eliminate BOTH Wisconsin and Iowa on the same step, meaning that Nebraska emerges as the victor, even though technically we both "beat" Wisconsin and then we'd normally lose to Iowa based on the head-to-head loss.
Again, that's a super improbable (impossible) circumstance, but it's kind of funny to think about. And it also means that yes, the Big Ten actually does weight divisional losses more heavily than cross-divisional losses, since
Steps 2 and 3 are directly about how you stack up to your division, Step 4 looks at the whole conference, and then
Steps 5 and 6 focus on cross-divisional ratings.