Reports from two different sources have indicated that Utah State will face Illinois State and VCU in the 2025-26 men’s basketball season. Rocco Miller reported the Illinois State matchup scheduled to be played in the Delta Center with Brian Phillips reporting that a game in Dallas on Nov. 7 against VCU is nearing finalization.
Illinois State went 22-14 last season, its first 20-win season since the Redbirds’ 2016-17 campaign, and finished fifth in the Missouri Valley Conference standings. Head coach Ryan Pedon is entering his fourth season, having taken over a program that had sunk to barely (or sometimes not) winning 10 games in a season and turning it around into a borderline MVC contender.
VCU is coming off a season in which it won the A-10 regular season and conference tournament titles, led by former Utah State head coach Ryan Odom and former Aggie guard Max Shulga. However, neither Odom or Shulga is with the team. Shulga graduated following last season and Odom took the head coaching job at Virginia back in March.
Utah State’s non-conference schedule is slowly coming together via unofficial reports, with as many seven games known prior to an eventual full schedule release by the Aggies. Assuming all of those reports turn into official announcements in the future, the following will be on the Aggies’ schedule this upcoming season.
- Away game at South Florida (part of a reported home-and-home series that began last year)
- Away game at Charlotte (part of a reported home-and-home series that began last year)
- Neutral site game vs Illinois State (reported Thursday by Rocco Miller)
- Neutral site game vs VCU (reported Thursday by Brian Phillips)
- Home game vs Memphis (reported by Jon Rothstein)
- Two games in Charleston, South Carolina as part of the Charleston Classic against a combination of three opponents — Boston College, Tulane and Davidson
There is some indication that Utah State may not end up playing Charlotte as part of the home-and-home series. In a sit-down with the media in May, current head coach Jerrod Calhoun noted that his team will play South Florida, but did not mention Charlotte. He said that they needed to “add one more true road game” so that they would have two such games. Were a game at Charlotte already in the cards, such a statement wouldn’t add up.
Calhoun also noted that having four or five “buy games” at home (i.e. matchups against lower level competition that end up as relatively easy wins) is typical. If all seven of those reported games end up on the schedule, four additional homes games against easier opponents would fill out the remaining allowed spots (with its 20-game conference schedule, USU gets 11 non-conference games).
