The Big Ten Conference may have problems with counting (they currently have 11 teams and will add a 12th, Nebraska, next year), but they do know football. Hardly a year goes by without one or more of the conference’s teams in the hunt for the national football championship as the season nears the end. And with some of the country’s largest football stadiums, there are hundreds of thousands of fans going to games every weekend. TheRealPlaces now has guides to the nearest hotels to all Big Ten football stadiums.
In recent years the most successful Big Ten team has been the Ohio State Buckeyes. They’ll once again have no problem filling all 102,000+ seats in Ohio Stadium in 2010. Amazingly, that’s only the third-largest stadium in the conference: The Michigan Wolverines regularly play in front of over 109,000 at Michigan Stadium and the Penn State Nittany Lions draw over 107,000 to Beaver Stadium for all of their home games.
The only team other than Ohio State, Michigan or Penn State to win or share the conference championship since 2002 are the Iowa Hawkeyes. If you want to see any of the five remaining home games on the Hawkeyes schedule, we’ve got all you need to know about the hotels near the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium.
The University of Illinois Illini football team has won the Big Ten championship 15 times, the last one coming back in 2001. The Illini play their home games at Memorial Stadium – easily the most popular stadium name in the conference. The Indiana Hoosiers also play at Memorial Stadium, but of course their’s is located on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. And when the Nebraska Cornhuskers join the Big Ten in 2011 we assume they’ll still be playing at – you guessed it – the Memorial Stadium located in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Northwestern University is the only private institution in the Big Ten – and has, by far, the smallest student population – but they won the championship a couple of times in the mid-1990’s and most recently shared the title in 2000. Northwestern’s stadium is in a residential district, but proximity to public transit and a location just north of Chicago make it relatively easy to find hotels for games at Ryan Field.
The Michigan State Spartans have won their first three games of 2010 and have Northern Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Purdue still scheduled to come to Spartan Stadium in East Lansing this season. The University of Minnesota Golden Gophers are off to a less successful start at 1-2 and they’ve still got Penn State and Ohio State among their five remaining home games at TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
The Purdue Boilermakers lost at Notre Dame in their first game of the season, but then recovered to 2-1 with home wins against Western Illinois and Ball State. Toledo comes to Ross-Ade Stadium in West Lafayette, Indiana this weekend, followed by visits from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana in October and November.
Alphabetically last, but not least, are the Wisconsin Badgers, who last won the Big Ten in 1999. The Badgers have started the 2010 season with three wins and have five more games at Camp Randall Stadium this year.
