Wildcats' hoops schedule includes two more Pac-12 games, as expected; few other surprises

For months, Pac-12 coaches, athletic directors and staffers have weighed countless ways to put together a viable COVID-friendly basketball schedule.

They talked about playing 18 games, 20 games or even a full 22-game round robin. There was the pod idea, with as many as six teams clustering together during a weekend to knock off games. There was a brief notion of having both men and women travel together and play parallel schedules.

And there was the idea of playing at least both of a team’s weekend games in the same arena, regardless of opponent.

In the end, on Thursday, the Pac-12 released what looks like a pretty typical, old-fashioned 18-game schedule, with Arizona spending New Year’s weekend in Washington and ending the regular season against ASU at McKale Center.

The difference is that the league stuck with its plan to play an extra two games in December, creating a 20-game slate for the first time ever, and arranged to stack up rivalry games so there could be some wiggle room in the event that teams need to reschedule because of a positive COVID-19 test and/or contact tracing.

“We’ve contemplated everything in terms of backups,” said Jamie Zaninovich, who oversees men’s basketball as the Pac-12’s deputy commissioner. “We’re not ready for everything. But we think we’re ready for a lot of things. And most importantly, we have the coaches, the ADs (agreeing) that we’re gonna have to be very flexible.”

The small numbers of a basketball roster and potential 14-day quarantines could make it daunting for anybody to get through a 27-game schedule intact but the Pac-12’s plan should allow for at least a handful of makeups unless problems arise late in the season.

All teams are scheduled to play two games a week during the first three weeks of the standard conference season, since they will have had the Christmas break period to recover from any issues earlier in December.

Then the fourth, fifth and six weeks sprinkle in rivalry games, in which a team will only be scheduled to face its geographic rival. That allows up to another six days to play games that couldn’t be played earlier — or a team could use the entire week to play makeup games by instead bumping the rivalry game to the final weekend of the regular season.

During that final week, teams are only scheduled to play their geographic rival on March 6 or 7, so they could instead play both rivalry games or use the other six days of that week to play makeup games. If the UA isn’t able to take a two-game road trip early in the season, for example, the Wildcats could host ASU on Tuesday, March 2, then make up that road trip later that week.

And, while all post-Christmas Pac-12 games are scheduled to be played within the customary Wednesday-Sunday window, games could also be made up on Mondays or Tuesdays if they can fit into a television window.

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“Honestly, this is where having our own network really helps,” Zaninovich said. “Because if we have to move something to a place where Fox and ESPN maybe are super-full, we generally have more flexibility on Pac-12 Networks.”

While the Pac-12’s travel partner system already cuts down on travel, allowing teams to play two games over a weekend often without a flight required in between, the idea of having men’s and women’s teams travel together was quickly discarded. The women’s teams have committed to a 22-game league schedule, and generally play Friday-Sunday schedules that were incompatible with the men’s team schedules.

The men’s teams stuck to their commitment to play 20 league games even though the NCAA reduced overall games allowed from 31 to 27 when it pushed the start of the season back from Nov. 10 to Nov. 25.

Zaninovich said Pac-12 coaches agreed that 20 games “still felt like the right number” because that allows more flexibility for teams to be strategic about their nonconference scheduling. UA, for example, opted to play all seven nonconference games at home in order to save on costs and travel risk while also allowing its young roster to acclimate.

“If a game is going to be canceled I’d much rather it be a home game, so we don’t have to travel back somewhere,” said Ryan Reynolds, UA’s director of basketball operations.

The idea of scheduling more than the traditional two games in a weekend was also thrown out but could be revisited if necessary.

“This notion of pods is something that we definitely have on our radar,” Zaninovich said. “We’re confident that if we needed to pivot to that, we could come up with solutions to limit the travel. But the guidance we got is once we got into the guaranteed daily (COVID) testing, the travel would not be quite as risky. This is all being guided by medical advice.”

Essentially, this season’s league schedule is the final year of the Pac-12’s rotating, 18-game rotation plus two games added back to the schedule that will be played in December. In Arizona’s case, the Wildcats were given back a Dec. 2 home game against Colorado and told to play Stanford on Dec. 19 — but the Wildcats will not host Utah nor play at Cal.

The unbalanced 18-game rotation replaced the Pac-10’s round-robin 18-game schedule when Colorado and Utah joined the league in 2011-12. Under the rotation, each team faces its geographic rival twice a season and misses one two-game road trip and one two-game home set, with all teams playing their rival 20 times over the decade and everyone else 16 times each.

The Pac-12 is likely to keep the same format for future 20-game schedules, using the 18-game rotation and then adding back two games from the schedule skips based on competitiveness and television partner preferences. With that flexibility, marquee rivalries such as UA-UCLA or UA-Oregon could always be added back if they were to be skipped.

“Before COVID hit, I think that the tenor of the ADs and coaches was that it was probably the way to go forward,” Zaninovich said. “But you never know. We’re gonna have a lot more discussions about scheduling strategy in the new world here once we hopefully get up and playing through this season.”