Arizona will use Pac-12 resources to stir some unprecedented interest in its spring football game: Rather than be played on a (too) warm afternoon at Arizona Stadium, it will now be played at 6 on a Friday night, April 10. The Pac-12 Networks will televise it.
Even though freshman quarterback Anu Solomon passed for 3,793 yards and 28 touchdowns this season — even though he took more than 1,100 snaps — spring ball at Arizona will chiefly be a chance for redshirt freshman quarterback Brandon Dawkins to audition for the starting QB job.
“My job isn’t set,” Solomon told me in the UA’s locker room Wednesday night at the Fiesta Bowl. “I’ve got to compete every day with Jerrard Randall and Brandon Dawkins. They want to be No. 1, they’re trying to take the job. I can’t have the mentality that I’m all set.”
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Staying at the elite level in the Pac-12 South demands more from its quarterbacks than Arizona got in the conference championship game and at the Fiesta Bowl, a pair of games in which the Wildcats were a dismal 37-for-76 passing (48.7 percent) with three interceptions.
Worse, the UA defense yielded 1,098 yards and 89 points in those games.
UCLA returns 18 of 22 starters, USC started 18 non-seniors in the Holiday Bowl, and Arizona State has 15 starters scheduled to return.
The Pac-12 won’t be getting any easier.