The Big Ten is the biggest winner in college sports.
With Michigan’s victory over UConn in the NCAA Tournament national championship game on Monday, the conference became the first league in history to hold the D-1 men’s basketball, women’s basketball and football national championships. Michigan joined UCLA, which won the women’s title on Sunday, and Indiana, which won the College Football Playoff in January, as three of the league’s current national champions in their respective sports.
The conference’s domination doesn’t end there, either. Yes, Indiana won the national title in football — the sport that stirs the drink — but it was the third straight Big Ten team to do so. It followed in the footsteps of Ohio State and Michigan, which means the Wolverines have won a football and men’s basketball title within three years of one another. Michigan is the first school to accomplish that since Florida won football titles in 2006 and 2008 while winning back-to-back basketball titles in 2006 and 2007.
More Big Ten domination coming in 2026?
The Big Ten’s run of success isn’t limited to the three “big” sports, either. The league is winning damn near everything at the moment. Wisconsin’s women’s hockey team won a national title in March. The men’s Frozen Four, which will take place later this week, mirrors the Final Four in that it includes two Big Ten teams. The only difference is that instead of those two being Michigan and Illinois, they’re Michigan and Wisconsin. While the No. 1 seed Wolverines are far from a sure thing there, they are the current favorites to win.
And, in what could be one more cruel twist of the knife for the SEC, the league that has seen its football dominance give way to its great rival from the north, the Big Ten, may wrest away a championship in the other sport the league loves. UCLA, the home of projected No. 1 pick in this summer’s MLB Draft, Roch Cholowsky, is currently the favorite at sportsbooks to win the College World Series.
This is all a very new phenomenon. While the Big Ten, and Wisconsin in particular, have won plenty of women’s hockey national titles in recent years, the league has not been nearly as successful in the other sports. When Michigan won the College Football Playoff in the 2023 season, it was the first Big Ten team to win the national title since Ohio State in 2014, and only the third Big Ten school to do so in the BCS/CFP era (the other was also Ohio State in 2002).
Michigan’s NCAA Tournament win on Monday night gave the Big Ten its first basketball title since Michigan State in 2000. UCLA’s women’s title was the league’s first since Purdue in 1999.
Should Michigan or Wisconsin win the Frozen Four this week, they’ll be the first Big Ten school to take a men’s hockey title since Michigan State in 2007. And baseball? Well, if UCLA wins the College World Series, it’ll be the first Big Ten program to dogpile on the mound in Omaha since Ohio State in 1966.
Big Ten built to thrive in new era of college sports
So what’s changed? The simple answer is to follow the money. It is not a coincidence that once schools were legally allowed to pay their athletes, the Big Ten began to thrive. Financially, the league has always been at the top of the sport. It consists of giant state schools with huge alumni and donor bases that have always been willing to give back to their universities and athletic departments. Except now, instead of having a gym or a cold tub room built in their name, that money is going directly to the athletes, making the schools a lot more attractive to the best recruits.
All the best high school football remains in the southern part of the United States, but those recruits are far more willing to leave home for the north when the money is right. And not just for the big names like Ohio State or Michigan. The money is spent just as well in Bloomington, Indiana, and Champaign, Illinois.
It’s also important to point out where the Big Ten has expanded. Former commissioner Jim Delany originally added Rutgers and Maryland at a time when leagues were chasing cable boxes for their new networks. While it was seen as a shortsighted move given that everybody would soon begin “cutting the cord” (How’s that working out by the way? We all saving money?), the league added the largest market in the country in New York, while also adding the DMV area. Then, Delany’s successor, Kevin Warren, showed up and shocked the world by cutting the Pac-12 off at the knees when he plundered USC and UCLA. Tony Petitti followed with Oregon and Washington.
Suddenly, the Big Ten was a league full of large schools that extended from coast to coast with the three largest markets (New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) in its footprint at a time when money was becoming an even more important factor than ever before. Which isn’t to say the SEC hasn’t added large schools with deep pockets of its own. It has. There are few schools in the country with the financial might of Texas. Culturally, however, the SEC has built a league of like-minded individuals who tend to value football success over everything else.
It should not be overlooked that the Big Ten added four schools from a conference that called itself “The Conference of Champions,” given its domination of the Olympic sports at a national level. Oregon won a women’s indoor track and field national title in 2025, while USC’s men’s team won both the indoor and outdoor titles in 2025. The women’s basketball title the Big Ten can now claim comes via UCLA, as would the potential baseball title this summer. Football may remain the chief financial engine of all athletic departments, but it’s not the only sport on which the Big Ten is spending money.
Is the Big Ten’s current run of dominance sustainable?
Of course, while the league’s pockets aren’t likely to dry up any time soon, that doesn’t mean this current run of dominance will be sustained. Results like what the Big Ten has seen in 2026 are far more likely to be an outlier than the norm going forward. You’d have to be a fool to believe the SEC won’t return to the top of the mountain in football at some point. The league cares far too much about the sport not to do everything in its power to win championships. The difference is that it won’t be able to dominate football the way it did for a quarter of a century before the Big Ten’s recent run.
The Big Ten will also see more challengers in basketball. UCLA may have won the women’s title this year, but UConn and South Carolina are still juggernauts. On the men’s side, the SEC has basketball schools, the Big 12 and ACC are heavily invested in it, and there is also still UConn. I mean, the Big Ten lost six games in the NCAA Tournament to teams from outside the Big Ten, and three of those losses came to UConn.
But while the Big Ten may not dominate across the board every year, it’s clear that the league will be a force to be reckoned with for quite some time.
