The Big Ten Conference (stylized B1G, formerly the Western Conference and the Big Nine Conference) is the oldest Division I collegiate athletic conference in the United States, incorporated as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives in 1896, predating the founding of its regulating organization, the NCAA. It is based in Rosemont, Illinois. For many decades this conference consisted of ten universities, and presently has 14 members and two affiliate institutions. They compete in the NCAA Division I; its football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly known as Division I-A, the highest level of NCAA competition in that sport.

Big Ten member institutions are major research universities with large financial endowments and strong academic reputations. Large student enrollment is a hallmark of its universities, as 12 of the 14 members enroll more than 30,000 students. Northwestern is the lone private university in the Big Ten. Collectively, Big Ten universities educate more than 520,000 total students and have 5.7 million living alumni. The members engage in $9.3 billion in funded research each year. Big Ten universities are also members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.Though the Big Ten existed for nearly a century as an assemblage of universities located in the Midwest, the conference's geographic footprint now stretches from the Great Plains region to the Atlantic Ocean. The conference has maintained its historic name, while expanding to fourteen members and two affiliate members.

James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens (September 12, 1913 – March 31, 1980) was an American track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games.Owens specialized in the sprints and the long jump and was recognized in his lifetime as "perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history". He set three world records and tied another, all in less than an hour, at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan—a feat that has never been equaled and has been called "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport".He achieved international fame at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, by winning four gold medals: 100 meters, long jump, 200 meters, and 4 × 100-meter relay. He was the most successful athlete at the Games and, as a black American man, was credited with "single-handedly crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy".The Jesse Owens Award is USA Track and Field's highest accolade for the year's best track and field athlete. Owens was ranked by ESPN as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the 20th century and the highest-ranked in his sport. In 1999, he was on the six-man short-list for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Century.