Arizona center Oumar Ballo (11), left, and guard Pelle Larsson (3) celebrate his scoring and picking up the foul against UCLA in the second half of their Pac 12 game at McKale Center, Tucson, Ariz., January 21, 2023.

 Kelly Presnell / Arizona Daily Star

Arizona will get a final crack at hosting UCLA in Pac-12 play this season, with the conference announcing Thursday that the longtime rivals will meet at McKale Center in mid-January instead of skipping the game as initially planned.

With 10 of its 12 members now taking off for other conferences in 2024-25, the Pac-12 scuttled the rotation intended to balance each team’s schedule skips over a 10-year period while assembling the weekend pairs for 2023-24 that it announced Thursday.

Under the original rotation plan, Arizona was to miss a home game with UCLA and a road game at Oregon State in 2023-24 as part of its 20-game conference schedule, but will now instead miss a road game at Washington and a home date with Oregon State.

The move to reinstate a final UA-UCLA Pac-12 game at McKale became a strong possibility after UCLA and USC announced in June 2022 that they would head to the Big Ten, though it required getting Colorado to agree to give up a potentially lucrative home date with the Bruins. Washington also lost a home game with Arizona as part of the restructured scheduling.

UCLA forward Adem Bona blocks a dunk attempt by Arizona center Oumar Ballo early in the first half of their Pac-12 game at McKale Center on Jan. 21, 2023.

β€œI think ESPN would definitely want it. Fox would definitely want it,” Pac-12 deputy commissioner Jamie Zaninovich said of having UCLA play at Arizona next season, in an interview with the Star during last season’s Pac-12 Tournament. β€œIt’s a matter of working it through the membership. The ADs are going to have to decide if it’s valuable enough to have that.”

For its final season with the current 12 teams, the Pac-12 will also hold all conference games after Christmas, since Selection Sunday won’t be until March 17 this season. Since moving from an 18- to a 20-game schedule in 2020-21, the Pac-12 had assigned each team two extra games in December, usually well before Christmas.

Arizona will open the restructured 2023-24 conference schedule in the Bay area to play California and Stanford before New Year’s Day, while the Wildcats will close conference play in potentially dramatic style at USC and UCLA. Arizona, USC, Colorado and UCLA are expected to be among the conference’s top teams in 2023-24.

During eight of the 11 weeks, the Pac-12 will follow its traditional β€œtravel partner” format, where each team and its geographic rival play another pair of geographic rivals during a Wednesday-Sunday period. But teams will single-play opponents in the third week (Jan. 10-14) and face geographic rivals and other single-play games during the eighth and 10th weeks.

For Arizona, that means playing only at Washington State the week of Jan. 10-14, while only hosting ASU between Feb. 14-18 and combining a game at ASU with a home game against Oregon during the week of Feb. 28-March 3. The home game against the Ducks will be UA’s regular-season home finale, with the Wildcats scheduled to spend the final week of the regular season in Los Angeles.

Exact dates and time will be announced after the Pac-12’s media partners have divvied up the games, probably within a month. All 120 conference games are scheduled to be televised via Pac-12 Network, ESPN or Fox platforms, or on CBS.

Arizona’s entire 2023-24 schedule is nearly complete, though an expected Dec. 23 game against Florida Atlantic in Las Vegas has not been confirmed. If it is, the Wildcats will not have met their 18-game home minimum for season-ticket packages.

As of now, UA is at the 31-game regular-season maximum with 17 home games, counting two exhibitions, so they would have to move a road or neutral-site game to McKale Center if they end up playing FAU in Las Vegas.

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Arizona had some fun with third-graders at St. Cyril’s in announcing its conference schedule:

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VIDEO: Arizona head coach Tommy Lloyd talks about The Wildcats' 85-71 win over Lebanon in Abu Dhabi on Aug. 19, 2023.

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Contact sports reporter Bruce Pascoe at bpascoe@tucson.com. On X(Twitter): @brucepascoe