The Pac-12 released its 2016 schedule on Tuesday evening, beginning Aug. 27 in Sydney, Australia and ending Dec. 2 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.
Rather than list the 200-odd games in between (see the full slate here), we’d rather list the most interesting game of each week, sort of a College GameDay blueprint if GameDay only covered the Pac-12.
With the caveat that we’d have trouble predicting whether or not the sun will come up tomorrow morning, let alone the importance of football games 10 months ahead of time, here goes nothing:
- Aug. 27: California vs. Hawaii (at Sydney, Australia)
- Sept. 3: USC vs. Alabama (at Arlington, Texas)
- Sept. 10: BYU at Utah
- Sept. 17: USC at Stanford
- Sept. 24: Stanford at UCLA
- Oct. 1: Arizona State at USC
- Oct. 8: Washington at Oregon
- Oct. 15: Stanford at Notre Dame
- Oct. 22: Utah at UCLA
- Oct. 29: Arizona State at Oregon
- Nov. 5: Oregon at USC
- Nov. 12: Stanford at Oregon
- Nov. 19: USC at UCLA
- Nov. 26: Notre Dame at USC
- Dec. 2: Pac-12 Championship (at Santa Clara, Calif.)
In addition to USC-Alabama, the Pac-12 also opens with Kansas State (at Stanford), BYU (at Arizona), Texas A&M (vs. UCLA) and Rutgers (at Washington). The league will see Texas Tech (at Arizona State), Virginia (at Oregon), Boise State (vs. Washington State), Michigan (vs. Colorado), Nebraska (vs. Oregon) and Texas (at California) dot the schedule.
And no league has a more wham-bang finish than Oregon-USC, Stanford-Oregon, USC-UCLA and Notre Dame-USC in consecutive November weeks.
The question, of course, is whether the slate is too tough, causing the Pac-12 to cannibalize itself out of another College Football Playoff spot.
But that’s a question we have another 10 months to debate.
