The Big Ten has emerged as the dominant conference in college sports.
The Big Ten’s case for being the best conference in college football was already clear when Indiana won the College Football Playoff in January. The Big Ten has now won each of the last three national titles in the most popular college sport, with Ohio State winning the CFP two years ago and Michigan triumphing three years ago.
On Sunday and Monday, the Big Ten’s case for being the premier conference across all of college sports became much stronger. First, UCLA snapped a 27-year drought by becoming the first Big Ten women’s basketball team since Purdue in 1999 to win the NCAA Tournament. One day later, Michigan snapped a 26-year drought by becoming the first Big Ten men’s basketball team since Michigan State in 2000 to win the NCAA Tournament.
The Big Ten is the first conference since the SEC in 2007 (Florida in football and men’s basketball, Tennessee in women’s basketball) to win the national championship in all three of those sports in the same year. It’s the first conference ever to have three different schools win the national championships in those three marquee sports in the same year.
Going B1G in @TimesSquareNYC pic.twitter.com/sCpDjAv86A
— Big Ten Conference (@bigten) April 7, 2026
And the Big Ten’s dominance doesn’t stop there.
The Big Ten has won all of the last 19 NCAA wrestling championships, including five straight titles by Penn State. The Big Ten has two of the four finalists in this year’s Frozen Four for men’s hockey, which will crown a national champion Saturday. Women’s hockey technically isn’t a Big Ten sport, but its member schools – specifically, Wisconsin and Ohio State – have won the last seven national championships in that sport. The Big Ten even has a chance of winning its first College World Series since 1966, when Ohio State won the college baseball national championship, as UCLA is currently ranked as the No. 1 team on the diamond.
Altogether, Big Ten teams are the most recent winners of 11 of the NCAA’s 39 Division I championships, also including field hockey (Northwestern), women’s golf (Northwestern), men’s gymnastics (Michigan), men’s soccer (Washington), men’s outdoor track and field (USC) and men’s water polo (UCLA). (That total doesn’t include non-NCAA sanctioned championships, including Ohio State’s sixth consecutive national title in pistol.)
| Conference | Number |
|---|---|
| BIG TEN | 11 |
| SEC | 10 |
| ACC | 9 |
| BIG 12 | 5 |
|
No other conference has more than one champion. Schools categorized by primary conference affiliation. |
|
Since 2024, when Oklahoma and Texas joined the SEC and Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington joined the Big Ten, the debate about college sports’ top league has centered around those two conferences. They’ve certainly separated themselves from the pack in college football, combining for 13 of the 25 teams in this year’s final AP Top 25, including seven of the top nine.
SEC fans will certainly argue that their conference reigns supreme on the gridiron, and until a few years ago, there wasn’t much debate that they did. From 2006 to 2022, the SEC won the college football national championship 13 times in 18 years. The SEC still has a strong argument for being the deepest league in college football, putting seven teams in the top 15 of the AP poll last season compared to three (Indiana, Ohio State and Oregon) for the Big Ten.
But when it comes to reaching the mountaintop of college football, the Big Ten has been king for the last three years, while an SEC team hasn’t even made it to any of the last three national championship games. The SEC has yet to even win a game against the Big Ten in the first two years of the 12-team College Football Playoff. And the Big Ten looks well-positioned to contend for a fourth straight college football national title next season. Ohio State, Indiana and Oregon are all ranked within the top five of preseason college football national championship odds for the 2026-27 campaign, while Michigan, USC, Penn State, Washington and Iowa are also projected as preseason top-25 teams per On3’s composite.
Basketball, particularly on the men’s side, was a sport where the Big Ten’s postseason performance had lagged behind its power-conference counterparts – also including the ACC, Big 12 and Big East – in recent years. But that changed in a big way this year, as the Big Ten put six teams in the Sweet 16 and tied the all-time record with four teams in the Elite Eight.
The SEC is just one year removed from putting seven teams in the Sweet 16 and winning the national championship with Florida, so more than one year is needed to say the Big Ten has actually pulled ahead of the SEC in men’s basketball. But it certainly had the best Big Dance of any conference this year. And more excellence is expected from Big Ten basketball next year; ESPN’s initial top 25 for the 2026-27 season includes seven Big Ten teams (No. 1 Michigan, No. 6 Michigan State, No. 8 Illinois, No. 14 Purdue, No. 17 USC, No. 18 Nebraska, No. 25 Iowa), though the SEC also has seven.
The SEC did put twice as many teams (six to three) in this year’s women’s basketball Sweet 16, but UCLA took down the conference’s top two teams in the Final Four, Texas and South Carolina, to emerge as the national champion.
UCLA became the first Big Ten women’s basketball team to win a national championship in 27 years with its win over South Carolina. (Photo: Joe Rondone/The Republic/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
Conference expansion has certainly helped the Big Ten establish itself as the top conference in college sports, as each of the four West Coast schools has won a national championship in at least one sport (Oregon in women’s indoor track and field) since joining the conference two years ago. NIL and revenue sharing have, too, as the Big Ten has brought in more revenue than the SEC and any other conference in every year since 2017 except for the 2021 fiscal year, when the Big Ten’s 2020 football season was significantly shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State largely carried the torch for the Big Ten in football until a few years ago, the conference now has more national championship contenders than ever before with the rapid rise of Indiana and the addition of three of the best football schools from the old Pac-12. The Big Ten was deeper than anyone in men’s basketball this season, leading all conferences with seven teams in the final AP poll.
The Big Ten remains likely to lag behind its southern counterparts in sports like baseball and softball that schools with warmer winter weather have typically dominated, though the conference’s new coast-to-coast footprint – particularly with the additions of UCLA and USC, which have the second- and third-most all-time national championships across all NCAA sports – has bolstered the Big Ten’s chances of winning titles in every sport.
The battle for conference supremacy between the Big Ten and SEC isn’t one that’s likely to end any time soon. But with the Big Ten currently holding a monopoly on national titles across the NCAA’s most prominent sports, it’s the conference everyone else in college sports is chasing right now.
