Well the Pac-10 released the “preliminary” football schedule for all of its teams.  From my understanding, the only thing preliminary is the non-conference schedule.  Once the conference schedule is released, it’s pretty much written in stone.  You can find the Pac-10 release at: http://www.fansonly.com/photos/schools/pac10/sports/m-footbl/auto_pdf/07FootballSched.pdf.  You can find the Cal press release at: http://calbears.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/011907aab.html.

As for the actual schedule here it is:

Sept. 1 Tennessee
Sept. 8 at Colorado State
Sept. 15 Louisiana Tech
Sept. 22 Arizona
Sept. 29 at Oregon
Oct. 6 BYE
Oct. 13 Oregon State
Oct. 20 at UCLA
Oct. 27 at Arizona State
Nov. 3 Washington State
Nov. 10 USC
Nov. 17 at Washington
Nov. 24 BYE
Dec. 1 at Stanford

This is a semi-significant change from what was previously published.  Basically, the Big Game was moved from its traditional date (for 2007 that would be Nov. 17th) to what is apparantly going to be the new traditional date.  All of the conference rivalry games are now after Thanksgiving as opposed to the Saturday before Thanksgiving.  With that change, the gave versus Washington was moved from October 6th to the newly vacated Nov. 17th date.

Other than the fact that it puts the squash on my previously planned road trip where I’d catch the Oregon and Washington on the road back to back, I’m also not looking forward to Cal having to go to Seattle in mid-November, particularly with what I’m sure will be a work-in-progess Washington team that may have gotten its act together between the two dates.

On the other hand, its been proven time and time again that from a ranking perspective, it is better to play games in those last couple weeks to impress the pollsters.  At the same time, adding a couple bye’s to what was previously a bye-less schedule has its advantages.

Here are the games that I think will be the critical ones next year:

• 9/29 at Oregon: Cal always struggles there and Oregon will not yet have had their confidence broken.
• 10/20 at UCLA: The home team has won the last 7 (or something like that) in this matchup.
• 11/10 USC: Do I really need to say anything?

The honorable mentions are 9/22 Arizona (they’re getting better) and 10/27 at ASU (lots of wasted talent in last few year, will the new coach be able to turn it around?).

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Sports, Sports - Cal Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.