2020 schedule

any word on when it will be released? need to plan my road games out. and im hoping 9-3
go utes!

Should be soon - last year’s was released early December.

Last year (2019 schedule) was Dec 4, 2018. Somewhere I thought I saw that the PAC-12 network was releasing it Jan 25th, but I can’t find it now. It’s SOOO late! Thanks Larry Scott - great job :roll_eyes:

I looked up other conferences and what I can tell is that:
SEC released their 2020 schedule Aug 7
Big 12 - Oct 22
AAC - Nov 18
Big 10 appears to have released the 2020 and 2021 conference schedule Sep 12, 2017!

I’m going to give Larry (and the PAC-12 scheduling team) the benefit of the doubt - after all, even a blind squirrel will eventually find a nut.

Other leagues, (and certainly the SEC is king of this practice), carefully evaluate all the data they have prior to releasing a schedule, and put together a schedule that protects the likely front runners from any significant competition from other likely league front runners until as late in the season as possible.

This allows each expected front runners to amass as many wins, and as many ranking votes as possible until late in the season. The result is that when a team eventually does lose to another expected front runner, both teams are as highly ranked as possible and the impact of the lose for one team is diminished, as well as magnifying the impact of the win for the other team.

The PAC-12 on the other hand, does things like last year’s FIRST CONFERENCE game for Utah, the unanimous pre-season favorite to win the south, playing USC, the only significant south competition.

September was not over and one of the two teams expected to win the south and play for the conference championship, was guaranteed to already have a loss.

Perhaps, our conference leadership, has accidentally stumbled onto this notion, and needs extra time to put into place the analytics to allow a better schedule to be created.

Of course this post is at least 50% TIC, but we can hope.

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I’m hoping they’re going to take the SEC approach and revise schedule to have the teams that are supposed to be good play late. In other words, we should play our USC and Washington games in November. Washington - Oregon should be November, and maybe even the ASU / USC and ASU - Utah games should be November. Oregon - USC should be November. Or at least mid-October. Enough of having your two South favorites play as a conference opener. It benefits nobody.

There is an advantage in the bias that is present in polling at letting teams accrue wins first and be undefeated or one loss late into the season. Then you get more of the SEC effect of “good beating good” and see less of a poll drop.

Course if we all suck next year this doesn’t matter either way…

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