The Pac-12 has rescheduled two more men’s basketball games, both involving Arizona or UCLA. When a similar situation arose several weeks ago, Wildcats fans were not happy. This time, low-level grumbling could surface in Westwood as well as Tucson.
Our goal is to explain the rescheduling process that applies across the conference. Sooner or later, decisions made in San Francisco could leave other schools less than pleased.
Let’s start with the news:
The conference office announced Arizona’s makeup game at ASU will be played on Monday, Feb. 7. That follows a huge home weekend against the Los Angeles schools and comes just before a road trip to Washington.
The Wildcats and Sun Devils have the same schedule; the only competitive disadvantage for Arizona for the makeup game is having to make the 80-mile drive to Tempe.
Meanwhile, the conference rescheduled UCLA’s game at Stanford for Tuesday, Feb. 8. That follows the weekend in Arizona and comes in advance of a visit to USC.
That’s right: The Bruins must play four consecutive road games in the first half of February.
Suboptimal situations? Sure. But during COVID, suboptimal is the new ideal.
From our vantage point, it appears the conference is running out of available weeks for makeup games. If more teams are forced to pause for COVID protocols, there might not be enough windows late in the season to replay all the postponed games.
After all, makeup dates cannot be tossed onto the calendar randomly. The conference office attempts to follow a set of principles when identifying windows to reschedule games:
- Teams should play no more than three games in a calendar week (defined as Monday to Sunday)
- Limit the instances in which teams play three games in a week (and not in back-to-back weeks)
- Each team should play every other team at least once
- Place makeup games on the broadcast network that owned the rights to the original game
- Be mindful of geography
- Balance the number of home and away games for each team
Those principles are included in the projected schedule, which is updated daily by the conference office and takes into account when teams on COVID pause should be available to return to the court. The goal is to announce makeup games two weeks in advance of the new dates.
The backdrop to every decision is the Pac-12’s strategic goal: Send as many teams to the NCAA Tournament as possible with the highest seeds possible.
(In some cases, that could result in the conference prioritizing one matchup over another for rescheduling purposes.)
Both No. 3-ranked Arizona and No. 7 UCLA are locks for the NCAAs — the issue is whether either claims a No. 1 seed on selection weekend.
Four consecutive road games isn’t ideal for the Bruins, but stood as a distinct possibility given that they had lost more road games to COVID than home games. At least three are short flights and the other is a few miles away. (It could have been worse.)
Arizona fans were frustrated a few weeks ago when the conference delayed the original showdown at UCLA, which would have been played immediately following a month-long COVID pause for the Bruins.
Now comes news that the Wildcats must play their rival on the road just two days after the big weekend against UCLA and USC.
Also less than ideal for a team that’s targeting a No. 1 seed and is one of the few in the conference that hasn’t been forced to pause for two or three weeks.
But COVID is everyone’s burden. The conference office can’t give credit with scheduling decisions to teams that have avoided the winter surge, just as it can’t assign fault with scheduling decisions to teams that have been hit by COVID in the past six weeks.
Everything must be tossed into the Pac-12’s model for rescheduling — the model that attempts to limit the physical burden on the players, create competitive balance for the teams and allow the conference to maximize its NCAA opportunities.
Suboptimal doesn’t mean unfair.
The makeup dates just announced for the Bruins and Wildcats might be the former, but they certainly aren’t the latter.
