The Pac-12’s football schedule for 2026 is unique, flexible and designed with one goal in mind: The College Football Playoff
The rebuilt Pac-12’s football schedule for 2026, set for release today at 6:30 p.m. (Pacific), will include seven round-robin league games, intra-conference home-and-home matchups, a flex weekend in late November and a home-host model for the conference championship game.
While there’s no precedent in major college football for certain components, there is a backdrop to the whole shebang: The College Football Playoff loomed large over every aspect of the painstaking process that required many months and hundreds of iterations.
That makes complete sense. The CFP is the reason the new Pac-12 exists in the first place.
The core four schools that joined Washington State and Oregon State did so with one eye fixed on the CFP. Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State (and later, Utah State) left their Mountain West brethren behind in order to strengthen their schedules, bolster their resumes and elevate their brands — all with the goal of reaching an expanded tournament that allots an automatic bid for the top team outside the power conferences.
The playoff was their North Star in September 2024, when they agreed to undertake the reclamation project, and it was their North Star when formulating the schedule for an eight-team conference.
Why? Because CFP appearances are a gilded path to the promised land — to whatever structure college football assumes in the 2030s, whether it’s a super league or a revised version of the current conference tiers.
Playoff fingerprints are perhaps most visible in the one-off nature of the schedule itself.
The Big Ten and SEC, which control the CFP format, recently announced the 12-team field would remain in place next season but reached no deal for 2027 and beyond. The Pac-12 followed suit, creating a schedule aimed at positioning its best team for the CFP. But because the playoff’s future is undecided, the Pac-12 opted against establishing a multi-year model that might not work if the field size or format changes.
(The potential for additional members in 2027 also influenced the conference’s decision.)
That said, the framework of the 2026 schedule includes traditional elements. The first four weeks are reserved for non-conference matchups, and the ensuing eight are blocked off for seven conference games, in round-robin fashion, and a bye.
But Week 12, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, is where the paths begin to diverge. What is the penultimate weekend of league play for everyone else in the FBS will be the decisive Saturday for the Pac-12 — the day it identifies the participants for the conference championship game, which will be played on the home field of the No. 1 seed.
That allows Week 13, known across the land as Rivalry Weekend, to become the Pac-12’s innovative flex Saturday: Four predetermined home teams and four predetermined road teams in matchups that won’t count toward the conference standings.
Tentative pairings have been set — that’s part of the official reveal this evening — but the conference will have the option to reconfigure which road teams play where based on two developments: 1) avoiding a matchup that will be repeated the following week in the conference championship; and 2) playoff positioning.
The Pac-12 probably cannot wait for the CFP rankings show on the Tuesday following Week 12 to finalize the pairings for Week 13, but it will have three weeks of CFP data available. And it will know the top playoff contenders from the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West and Sun Belt.
Essentially, the Pac-12 will compare its top team with the best from the other Group of Six conferences and determine which matchup is best for Week 13. The options will be somewhat limited (because of the four predetermined home teams), but there could be vital leeway within the system.
For example, let’s say San Diego State has the No. 1 seed secured and is tentatively scheduled to face a struggling opponent on the flex Saturday. If the Aztecs are ranked a few spots behind Tulane, the top team in the American, the Pac-12 would have the option to rejigger the Week 13 lineup and match SDSU against a stronger opponent in order to boost its strength-of-schedule.
After all, schedule strength and its metric cousin, strength-of-record, are critical pieces of the CFP selection process — and their significance is increasing by the year as the Big Ten and SEC, with all their blue-blood programs, shape the process to their liking.
In fact, the desire to produce the stoutest possible schedule was behind the Pac-12’s decision to lean on itself for the fifth non-conference game.
The supply of potential Power Four opponents across the three-month regular season dwindled last year when the ACC and SEC announced they would begin playing nine-game conference schedules (instead of eight) in 2026.
Once the Pac-12 determined it would implement a true round-robin schedule with seven league games, it could have filled the fifth non-conference spot with teams outside the Power Four.
But that approach was logistically difficult, financially daunting (to pay for an opponent) and competitively risky.
What if the only options were lower-tier FBS opponents or teams from the FCS? Those matchups could have undermined strength-of-schedule and strength-of-record ratings.
In the example cited above, San Diego State’s resume would have been at the mercy of a pre-arranged non-conference opponent. Instead, the Pac-12 opted to retain control of the 12th game and configure the best matchup possible for CFP access.
The plan isn’t flawless, and it might last a single season if the CFP is revised for 2027. But the innovation baked into the underlying structure is as obvious as the endgame: For the rebuilt conference, everything is about the playoff.
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