The Big Ten released its conference schedule for 2024 and 2025, and the league certainly didn't do Northwestern many favors.

The Big Ten's new era includes USC and UCLA and excludes divisions. The Big Ten will use a "Flex Protect Plus" scheduling system to preserve some rivalries and determine the two teams that will play for the championship in the conference's wide-open, 16-team standings.

Let's break down what the Big Ten's brave new world means for Northwestern.

Flex Protect Plus didn't make it easy for Northwestern: Instead of divisions or pods, the Big Ten used what they coined as the Flex Protect Plus system to allocate games in 2024 and 2025, whereby each school gets one to three protected opponents that they'll play every year in perpetuity, and a total of three teams that they'll play in both of the seasons. Then they will rotate through the rest of the teams in the league.

Illinois is Northwestern's lone protected rival, making the Land of Lincoln Trophy matchup one of the conference's 11 protected games. It will be played annually over the next two years and beyond under the current conference framework.

The other two teams Northwestern will play in both 2024 and 2025 are Ohio State and Purdue. Ohio State is an extremely tough draw, and even though Michigan may have supplanted the Buckeyes as the conference's 800-pound gorilla the last two years, it's hard to see the Wildcats being competitive in either game. Purdue could fall off after the departure of head coach Jeff Brohm to Louisville, but if Ryan Walters can keep the Boilermakers on track the Big Ten gave Northwestern a tough draw.

The Wildcats got one of the toughest schedules in the conference. They have the second hardest at-large pairing, by 2022 win totals, behind only Rutgers. The Scarlet Knights drew UCLA and Penn State, and USC is right behind Northwestern with Penn State and Wisconsin.

The Purple will be back in Pasadena! Just maybe not they way fans had hoped.

Northwestern will play in the Rose Bowl in 2024 for the first time since 1996, but it won't be on New Year's Day. The Wildcats are part of the welcoming party for both USC and UCLA in 2024. The Wildcats will play the Bruins in Pasadena and host the Trojans, most likely in Chicago, as Ryan Field gets renovated.

Dates and times have not yet been set, so it remains to be seen if USC head coach Lincoln Riley needs to buy a winter coat. If construction of the new $800-million Ryan Field goes as scheduled, Northwestern will play at an alternate site in both 2024 and 2025. The yet-to-be-finalized plan is to play at Soldier Field until the end of the Chicago Cubs season, and then play at Wrigley Field for the remainder of the schedule.

This means that the Trojans could get their "Welcome to the Big Ten" moment against the Wildcats if it happens in November, with temperatures below freezing and the wind whipping off Lake Michigan.

2024, in particular, may be a rough road: The Big Ten's level of competition took a step up by adding USC and UCLA, and the Wildcats will be feeling the pain with both teams on the schedule in 2024.

On top of that, the Wildcats will get just four home conference games that year, with one of them being against USC. The five road games will feature trips to traditional Big Ten powers Ohio State and Penn State, as well as a long trip out to the West Coast to face the Bruins. Without a home stadium, the 2024 schedule will be one of the toughest slates in program history.

In 2025, the Wildcats avoid the Pacific time zone, but they have to play Michigan at the Big House, Iowa at Kinnick Stadium and Michigan State in East Lansing. They keep Ohio State on the schedule and will host Wisconsin.

The road back to a Big Ten title game is much harder: There are still plenty of winnable games on the schedule if Northwestern can shake the funk its been in over the last two seasons.

But the elimination of the West division will make the road to recovery more difficult and the journey back to a Big Ten title game nearly impossible. The Wildcats no longer have to beat out Wisconsin and Iowa in the little-brother West to get to the championship game, like they did in 2018 and 2020. They will have to be among the top two in a league that also features Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, USC and UCLA.

The pathway back to even the top half of the conference will be a lot more difficult.