If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times: Normal solutions don’t apply to a pandemic and this very weird, unsettled, scary time we live in. Ideas which would be crazy in normal periods shouldn’t be considered ridiculous in these adjusted circumstances.
The Pac-12 has already moved to a conference-only football game schedule for 2020, but it hasn’t yet announced the details of its plan.
A story on Sunday from the Casper (Wyoming) Star-Tribune underscores the point that creative options exist for filling out a conference schedule.
Davis Potter reported on Wyoming’s uncertainties, and what the school’s athletic director, Tom Burman, is considering while he waits for the Big 12, SEC, and ACC to reveal their scheduling plans for the fall.
One option on the table for Wyoming is playing foremost rival Colorado State twice.
If you can’t play a full 12-game season, and if you can’t have teams outside your conference on the slate, why the hell NOT play your rival twice to spice things up and generate more local interest in the program?
Keep in mind that while we won’t see anything close to full stadium capacity at games this fall — 30 percent capacity would seem to be at the HIGH end of possibilities at this point; that would rate as a real achievement, while 20 percent seems like a more likely figure — getting 30 percent of fans into a stadium rates as a lot better than having no fans at all.
Rivalry games being played twice — as opposed to filling an open date with an FCS school — makes sense in terms of attracting fans to a stadium, even in reduced numbers.
Moreover, the genius of a two-rivalry-game plan is that fans who couldn’t attend the first of the two games could attend the second one. Think of this as USC and UCLA playing eight quarters in front of 38,000 people — 18,000 in one four-quarter game at the Coliseum and 20,000 in the other four-quarter game at the Rose Bowl.
It sounds stupid in normal times… but again, these times aren’t normal.
If the Pac-12 wants a 10-game conference-only game schedule — the regular nine games plus one add-on — would it be better for USC to play Washington State or Oregon State, the two teams currently not scheduled to face the Trojans in 2020, OR…
would it be better for USC to simply circle back and play UCLA a second time?
I know which option most USC fans would choose.