Big Ten news: Ohio State football cancels home and home with Washington

On Wednesday, the Ohio State football program announced that is has canceled its home-and-home series with the Washington Huskies, which was initially set to take place in 2024 and 2025. Remember when Buckeyes fans made fun of the Wolverines for canceling their home-and-home with ULCA? Life comes at you fast.

Details released

It appears as if Washington football is quite bummed about the cancelation of this massive PAC 12-Big Ten series, which was initially supposed to see the Buckeyes travel to Washington in September of 2024, and for the Huskies to return the favor a year later. Here is the statement released by Washington’s athletic department following the cancelation:

“We are very disappointed that our student-athletes, staff and Husky Nation won’t get to experience these two games with Ohio State,” said UW director of athletics Jennifer Cohen. “Everyone has had these dates circled for a number of years and we were looking forward to these opportunities to compete against the Buckeyes. We are in the process of finding new opponents for the 2024 and 2025 seasons and will provide an update as soon as we have one.”

The series was originally scheduled in mid-2017, though as the games approached, Ohio State football has since backed out. Here is Ohio State’s comments on the cancelations:

“We initiated the cancellation,” Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said. “I have the utmost respect for the University of Washington and for director of athletics Jennifer Cohen, and this was a very difficult call to make… As a result of the cancellation, we will add an eighth home game for the 2024 season, affording us the opportunity to have the funding to pay the penalty and guarantee for that eighth opponent.”

This could have something to do with a potential travel schedule during the 2024 and 2025 seasons — 2024 is the first year that USC and UCLA will be in the conference, and the Buckeyes might not want to fatigue their players. Still, it is not a great look for the Ohio State football program to back out this close to the series.

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