Over a 13-week regular season slate, the Pac-12's 2026 football schedule will include:
- A four-game non-conference slate to begin the season over Weeks 1-4 (Sept. 5-26).
- A seven-game round-robin slate for league-play over an eight-week span, with one bye week each during that stretch from Weeks 5-12 (Oct. 3 - Nov. 21).
- A home-and-home flex matchup among the league's eight football members to conclude the regular season in Week 13 (Nov. 28), which will be considered a non-conference matchup for standings.
- Home-and-Home Flex Matchup
For 2026 and the league's home-and-home flex matchup to conclude the regular season in Week 13, the Pac-12 will retain the right to adjust matchups based on the best interests of the league, including College Football Playoff (CFP) considerations at that time.
Thought the flex game was a clever wrinkle to max out their CFP chances. What do you guys think?
EDIT: Another wrinkle I loved is the conference championship game will be played on-campus.
Forums:
DISCLAIMER: Forum topics may not have been written or edited by The Key Play staff.
Comments
Or just max out chances for more ratings and more TV money,
I love it.
In 2020, BYU vs Coastal Carolina was scheduled with less than a week of lead time, and that game was fucking awesome.
We don't need to schedule games years in advance.
Give me flex games. Give me promo/relegation. Let's get weird.
Ask your doctor about College Football Fever if you can:
- remember the details of a 2020 game between BYU and Coastal Carolina
I got a fever! And the only prescription is more
cowbellCFB!Yeah, that's a good idea and the rest seems to give a good amount of flexibility to the teams as well.
Especially as the home and home allows for teams to maintain games with their selected rival.
Hopefully this is the first step in the final regular season game becoming a semifinal of sorts to determine conference championship matchups. Too few games in to big of leagues.
This is close to my idea ive floated for years, make everyone play conference game weekend, so 1v2, 3v4, 5v6 ... though the entire conference.
This sounds better than seven layer tiebreaker scenarios. Just make the teams play each other to settle potential conf championship ties.
Tickets and fans logistics will be hell, but people make it work for conf champ games on short notice.
Tickets should be too crazy because the home teams are locked in
As an advocate of all things seven layered, I agree.
"Let's take 1-11 Texas St and make them travel to 9-3 Fresno St hoping to get a sniff of the G5 slots in the playoff" is how I'm reading the flex game...
Yeah I don't really get how you could help one of the good teams? Especially when it's round robin and you've already played that team.
They should've gone 5 noncon with like mandatory 3 P5 or something like that. With only 8 teams that would be feasible
My first thought was something like this:
If the PAC is vying for the only G5 playoff spot, and they find themselves behind the American favorite, then they might as well try to boost their schedule to see if they can help SoS or soemthing.
If you mandate 3 P5's then you have a serious schedule and multiple early season TV opportunities . You could make the 4th game a high G5 game vs the American or even certain high G5's. Then the 5th a low G5/FCS
That's a pretty high strength of schedule where if multiple teams steal a few P5 games, all of the sudden the whole conference has to be taken seriously.
A late season noncon would be sick, but it would be challenging to get other conferences to agree to that. But would love if they could pull it off
Smart on the part of the conference, but its another example of not having a level playing field across college football.
The flex game is a concept that may work well when you have divisions such that you may not have played a certain team in the regular season, but I'm not sure that it works when you're creating an automatic replay of an earlier game.
Like if you had a 16-team, 4 division league, you can always have the last weekend of the season be two sets of 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 between two divisions, where the 1v1 games are de facto semifinals for the conference championship game. But other than that scenario, what are you getting out of it?
Like is said above, they can stack the game w the last place team traveling to the first place team. Then there's a chance at getting a piece of the playoff pie w the G5 qualifier spot...so its about $$$. An easy way to tilt the field.
recommended this a decade ago...lots of folks said you can't do it. obviously you can and unless your conference gets 4 auto berths in the playoffs, you should.