ASU Football: Preferred Schedule for 2020 Season
While the Pac-12 schedules haven’t been released yet, it’s clear as to what kind of schedule would be most beneficial to ASU this year.
With a seven-game schedule, it, of course, remains to be seen as to whether that will be enough for the CFP committee to take an interest in a Pac-12 team for the Playoff this year.
“We don’t know how they’re going to do it this year, right?” said Head Coach Herm Edwards. “I think draw has a lot to do it, what your team looks like. Who they’ve played has a lot to do with it. I mean this is a unique season.”
Regardless, ASU will be playing all five division rivals and one cross-division rival through the first six games. After that, the best team from the South will play the best team from the North, and as for the other ten Pac-12 teams, they will still be playing a seventh game. How the rest of the conference shakes up for week seven is yet to be determined, but everyone will be playing a seventh game.
The Pac-12 South isn’t necessarily a bad division. There are two teams (USC and Utah) ranked in the Preseason AP Top 25 Poll. With USC losing both OL Alijah Vera-Tucker and DL Jay Tufele to NFL Draft opt-outs, and Utah returning very little talent from last year, ASU is right in the mix.
The rest of the division is admittedly nothing special, although Arizona is returning a substantial amount of talent and could possibly pull off a couple of upsets here or there with a promising sophomore quarterback in Grant Gunnell. UCLA and Colorado look bad, but that’s not enough to dismiss the South as a bad division. It may not be the most impressive, but it’s not incapable of catching the CFP’s attention.
Also, if Vera-Tucker and Tufele end up coming back to USC due to the return of the season, it obviously makes the division tougher. It does, however, make USC somewhat of a truly overwhelming favorite. It’s tough to imagine ASU being better than USC in that situation unless USC Head Coach Clay Helton really is as bad as many in Los Angeles worry that he is.
As of right now, though, AVT and Tufele haven’t announced plans to come back. Therefore, the division schedule as of right now looks like it won’t be a gauntlet, but it will still be rather competitive. Therefore, ASU shouldn’t want one of the North’s best or worse teams in their cross-divisional contest.
This is because if they run the table, the South doesn’t look like a cake-walk to the CFP committee, and therefore going undefeated before the title game would be impressive. This only goes so far, however, in regards to that cross-division game.
If ASU plays one of the worst teams in the Pac-12 North, their schedule could be looked at as much easier. Even if they go undefeated, the South (while competitive as mentioned previously) may not be good enough to sway the committee to plug ASU in the Playoff if their non-divisional game is a joke.
But ASU should also not be hoping that they don’t play the projected best team of the North in Oregon.
This is because theoretically, they would have to go through them anyways in the Pac-12 Championship game to give themselves a Playoff bid. It would be unwise to take an interest in having to beat Oregon twice—once in the regular season and in the PAC-12 title game. That may be too tough of a schedule.
Therefore, ASU should want Washington or Cal. Two teams that have potential but are beatable.
Cal went 7-2 with Chase Garbers as their starting QB last year. In the two games that they lost, Garbers left for injury. They wouldn’t have beaten USC if he would have stayed in the game, but it appeared that they were going to beat ASU when they played them, and when Garbers left that game, Cal looked terrible.
With Garbers back in the lineup healthy, they will be better than the 7-5 team they were last year. Washington has talent as well; people just aren’t bullish on their chances this year due to their head coaching change. ASU should want one of these teams because it could look great on their Playoff resume, but it wouldn’t be a tough enough contest to the point where ASU could lose if they are indeed one of the four best teams in the country.
If ASU can win the first six games and go on to beat Oregon in the Pac-12 Championship game, that at least gives them a bid for the College Football Playoff. And it’s not even clear as to whether just seven games won’t be enough for the committee to approve of an undefeated Pac-12 season.
“Who knows? I mean, even those teams who started earlier and they said they were going to make it up, there’s no guarantee they’re going to make it up,” said Edwards. “On paper, it sounds like they’re going to make it up. But we don’t know what this is going to look like two months from now, or a month from now, or a week from now. We’re going week to week.”