College football: Schedule no help for Cal this week

Under ideal circumstances, Cal would face a daunting challenge Thursday against surging USC. But the Bears' slim prospects for victory have seemingly been rendered microscopic by their own conference, the Pac-12, which created a schedule imbalance that approaches the ridiculous.

The Bears, who played a double-overtime game Friday night, are tasked with a short-week road game against an opponent that's coming off a bye.

One team in the L.A. Coliseum will have had five days between games. The other hasn't played since Oct. 15.

“It's one of those deals where you go, ‘How in the world could this ever happen? How could somebody let this happen?'” Bears coach Sonny Dykes said.

The situation is unprecedented: Never before in Pac-12 history has a team with less than a full week to prepare faced a team coming off a bye.

In this case, the team with the short week is on the road, and in the middle of mid-terms.

“It has been a disaster; it's been a mess,” said Dykes, who held practice on Monday - normally a day off for the players - in order to get ready to play Thursday.

“It's incredibly hard on our kids.”

The Bears have known this was coming since late last year, when the conference presented a master 2016 schedule to the schools for approval.

In response to a request for comment, Cal athletic director Mike Williams noted the “unusual circumstances” of the schedule but said the Bears wanted to “respect the will of the majority of our conference colleagues once the vote is conducted.”

The Pac-12 did not immediately respond to an inquiry, but let's not mistake the silence - or the situation itself - as a sign of a conspiracy against the Bears.

Rather, it's an unfortunate upshot of the scheduling difficulties created by the addition of a conference football championship game, which squeezes the weeks available for the regular season, and the contract with ESPN and Fox.

In exchange for paying the conference $3 billion over 12 years, the networks were granted the flexibility to schedule Pac-12 football games in time slots that would otherwise feature billiards, bowling or reruns of mindless studio shows.

There's nothing better than college football at 7 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Among the Power 5 conferences, the Pac-12 is the only option - the Big Ten and SEC can't start games at that hour.

The resulting barrage of night games isn't ideal for fans. For the teams, the foremost issue is travel. With night kickoffs, the road team often doesn't return to campus until 3 or 4 a.m.

In moderation, the logistics are manageable. But moderation occasionally gives way to egregious demands.

Like last season, when Arizona played an 8 p.m. game in Seattle, then was back on the road the following week (at USC).

Or when UCLA was asked to play back-to-back Thursday games.

“It's unbelievable,” Bruins coach Jim Mora said. “We're calling these kids student-athletes, and yet we're going to force them to miss six days of school so they can play two football games on Thursday nights in a row. I think it's truly an injustice.”

There is no way around the night kickoffs. The contracts were signed years ago, and the conference is not about to give back the money. But tweaks on the margins, like eliminating back-to-back weeknight games, would help.

The obvious solution, capping the number of night road games for each team, simply isn't feasible: There are a contracted number of night games on ESPN, Fox and the Pac-12 Networks and only so many available teams.

Over the past three and a half seasons, the Bears have played twice as many conference road games at night (10) as the average of the other 11 teams - and nobody else is even close.

Again, it's not a conspiracy. It's the reality of the TV contracts combined with Cal hitting that sweet spot of mediocrity that lends itself to the night windows: The Bears are good for the noon kickoffs but not good enough for the prime time slots (4 and 5 p.m.).

It's up to the conference to monitor the situation, to create equity in the process, and - above all - to guarantee no team ever has to experience the absurd situation facing Cal this week.