The Ohio State football team will have four non-conference games this season.Next year after USC and UCLA join the Big Ten, they will play just three. That means they will have nine conference games instead of the eight they have this season. Not everyone is like that though.
Across college football, there is no uniform schedule format. Some conferences require just eight conference games while others require nine. Not only are the number of conference games different but how they rotate through the conference is different as well.
This is how there are so many unbalanced schedules across the country, including among the elite college football programs.