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 more complicated by breaking things down by non-conference and conference schedules to see where things could end up diverging, for better or worse, between the 2025 and 2026 slates.
Non-Conference (excluding vs FCS)
2025 Schedule
- vs UTEP (2-10, 129th in SP+)
- @ Texas A&M (11-2, 10th)
- @ Vanderbilt (10-3, 11th)
- COMBINED WIN% — 0.459
- AVG SP+ Rank — 73.3
2026 Schedule
- @ Washington (9-4, 13th in SP+)
- @ Utah (11-2, 8th)
- vs Troy (8-6, 87th)
- COMBINED WIN% — 0.700
- AVG SP+ Rank — 36.0
Last year the Aggies took on two playoff-caliber SEC teams on the road and this year things aren’t projected to be much easier. SP+ likes the Huskies and Utes far better than most people’s rankings (the AP Top 25 Poll put Utah 14th and Washington was second in the “others receiving votes” section), but both are pretty likely to be very solid teams next year. Utah State would do incredibly well to win either of their games against these Power Four opponents.
Utah State’s other non-FCS game in the non-conference will be more difficult as well. UTEP was as bad as it’s ever been in 2025 but Troy has consistently been solid the last four years. The Aggies will have the benefit of playing at home, but it will be a tough matchup.
Conference Games
2025 Schedule
- vs Air Force (4-8, 81st in SP+)
- @ Hawaii (9-4, 68th)
- vs San Jose State (3-9, 118th)
- @ New Mexico (9-4, 73rd)
- vs Nevada (3-9, 116th)
- @ UNLV (10-4, 57th)
- @ Fresno State (9-4, 66th)
- @ Boise State (9-5, 64th)
- COMBINED WIN% — 0.544
- AVG SP+ Rank — 80.4
2026 Schedule
- @ Boise State (9-5, 64th)
- vs Washington State (7-6, 61st)
- @ Texas State (7-6, 65th)
- vs Colorado State (2-10, 124th)
- vs Fresno State (9-4, 66th)
- @ San Diego State (9-4, 43rd)
- @ Oregon State (2-10, 126th)
- vs FLEX (probably Boise State)
- COMBINED WIN% — 0.519
- AVG SP+ Rank — 76.6
Utah State didn’t play two of the Mountain West defectors during its conference schedule last year. That, combined with not playing Oregon State and Washington State (in the regular season), it makes for a very different-looking schedule for the Aggies despite a lot of familiar team names.
The toughness of this conference schedule is going to be highly dependent on how well Colorado State and Oregon State bounce back from their respective two-win seasons. If both were able to crawl back to even a 6-6 record, it would have a pretty drastic impact on USU’s strength of schedule. The opponents’ winning percentage would be essentially .600 and average SP+ would rise to the mid-to-low 60s.
Although, alongside all of that speculation, it needs to be said that the teams who had good or decent seasons last year would also have to keep it up. There isn’t any guarantee that Texas State will maintain a 7-6 mark in its first Pac-12 season, for example. There’s also the fact that it’s be nearly impossible for the entire conference to be bowl eligible. It’s possible mathematically but it requires an absurdly good non-conference performance by all teams and then basically every team winning between 3-5 conference games.
The whole point of the Pac-12 experiment was to eliminate the necessity of playing bottom-dwelling Mountain West teams, so ideally conference play will be where Utah State can increase its strength of schedule compared to what it faced in an average season in the Mountain West. That can provide a path to the playoff, assuming one remains open, which is not a solid assumption given how the Big Ten, SEC and their mouthpieces have been acting of late.
