Penn State Basketball’s B1G Opponents Released

The Big Ten Conference released the conference opponents for the upcoming 2021-2022 Men’s Basketball Season, including for Penn State Basketball.

Penn State Basketball will have “home and home” match-ups with Minnesota, Rutgers, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Northwestern.  The Nittany Lions will just host Michigan, Nebraska and Purdue, and just travel to Wisconsin, Illinois and Maryland.

Times and dates will be announced at a later date (bet on PSU starting on the road, or having a quick road turnaround game across time zones vs a ranked oppnent) but, let’s take a quick analysis of who PSU has to play twice.

Both Northwestern and Rutgers aren’t expected to be amazing this year but no doubt OSU, MSU, and Iowa will be tough games.  Indiana, also with a new head coach, is more of an unkown.

It’s great to not have to travel to Michigan or Purdue, both very hard road gymnasiums, but it sure would be nice to have Nebraska twice.

Having to travel to Maryland can guarantee at least 30 fouls called against the Nittany Lions and both Kohl Center (Wisconsin) and State Farm Center (Illinois)…it’s quite possible Penn State will lose all three of the “just road games”.

There’s never an “easy schedule” in the nation’s hardest conference, but all in all, this could have been worse.

Try to split all your home and home games gets you seven wins (two vs Northwestern, two vs Minnesota, one vs Rutgers, one vs Indiana one vs Iowa) and then try to get two of your just home games (Nebraska for sure and split one of Purdue/Michigan) and then steal one of your just road games (maybe at Illinois) and there’s your 10-10 conference record.   Seems…possible?