How Utah State’s 2026 football schedule compares to its 2025 slate | Sports
The Pac-12 released its first football schedule in the new era of the fabled “Conference of Champions.” And with it, we have the full 2026 schedule for the Utah State Aggies. There are some new quirks to this schedule, which require some explanation and examination. There’s also the question as to how it compares to 2025. Will it be an easier or more difficult schedule than what Bronco Mendenhall and the Aggies had to take on in his first year as the head coach? They aren’t the easiest questions to figure out in February, given we’ll have to paste 2025 results and records onto 2026, but it’s the best picture we’ll get until August/September (or until preseason rankings come out and we re-do this analysis based on those). Starting with the end result of a bunch of data collection and math, Utah State’s schedule in 2026 looks to be very similar in difficulty to 2025. The data indicating this being opponents’ overall win percentage from the 2025 season (0.560 for the 2025 schedule and 0.569 for 2026) and in average ranking in Bill Connelly’s SP+ metric (72.1 last year, 65.5 for this upcoming season). But let’s make this a little