I wrote in today's paper about the cancelled home-and-home series with Texas, which removes a true national power from the Gophers' future schedule. Athletic director Joel Maturi said Minnesota intends to replace the Longhorns with another school from a BCS conference, so while the new opponent may not necessarily be a national championship contender – then again, the game is in 2015, so who knows? – it should be a relatively high-profile game. And we should know soon who it will be. Maturi confirmed Wednesday that the Gophers have found a potential match for a 2015-16 home-and-home, and are "close" to signing the contracts. He doesn't want to reveal the replacement opponent until the paperwork is official, but expect to hear something in the next month or two. The fact that the Gophers, like every major football-playing university, is trying to finalize its non-conference schedule before some of the kids who will play those games have even entered high school just points out the obstacle facing one idea that's been floating around the Big Ten lately: Expanding the conference schedule from eight to nine games. As Adam Rittenberg wrote on espn.com last week, some athletic directors around the league want to consider a ninth game once Nebraska joins the conference a year from now. Doing so would somewhat reduce the randomness of schedule strength (since teams would miss two league members annually instead of three), add one more recognizable name to each team's schedules, and eliminate the need to pay one more big guarantee to a lower-tier team willing to absorb a loss. Maturi is open to the idea, but he's skeptical it can be easily implemented – and the far-in-advance scheduling is a big reason. Contracts can be undone, as the Texas experience proved, but there would be an awful lot of buyouts necessary around the league in order to make room. Here's another problem, though: Like most of his peers, Maturi is intent upon scheduling seven home games a year, easily done when there are only four Big Ten road games. The Gophers have one road non-conference game and three home games in most seasons. Expanding to nine league games, however, means the Gophers would have five Big Ten road games every other year, leaving no room to travel to a non-conference game. That's not a problem for scheduling the Western Illinois and North Dakota States of the world, but attracting BCS level opponents means agreeing to home-and-home series. It's a hurdle that can be overcome with some deft scheduling, but no consensus has emerged yet about whether it's worth the trouble. (And coaches might balk, too, at trading a relatively certain win for a tough conference game.) The league's athletic directors will discuss it in Chicago next week. Speaking of non-conference games, check out the daunting challenge Indiana has lined up for itself this fall: Towson, at Western Kentucky, Akron and Arkansas State. Towson is a FCS team that went 2-9 last season, while Western Kentucky was 0-12. That group went a combined 9-38, which is why The Gazette (of Cedar Rapids, Iowa) ranked the Hoosiers' non-conference slate as the worst in the league. Minnesota, with USC coming to town and two other bowl teams on the schedule, ranks as the second-toughest in the league, behind only Illinois. One last scheduling note to make you smile: Just nine days until training camp opens.