For most students, dead week is a time to feverishly study for
finals. For the UCLA football team, dead week means preparing for a
big game against Washington State, a game that may have Rose Bowl
implications.
“I’m sure it will be tough to focus on finals with
the game that week,” wide receiver Garrett Lepisto said.
“But we’ll get a lot of help from tutors for finals
that week.”
When the football schedule was originally made, the Washington
State-UCLA game was originally going to be played this
Saturday.
However, that game was switched to Dec. 7 over the summer.
“The game was moved for a variety of reasons,” UCLA
sports information director Marc Dellins said.
“The national exposure will give a lot to the program,
being the only game on ABC at that time slot. This creates a bye
week before the USC and the Washington State game. And there are
some financial ramifications when you’re guaranteed a
national audience,” he said.
According to Dellins, the school will get twice as much money as
they would for a normal regional game, which comes out to several
hundred thousand dollars.
The vast majority of the games played on Dec. 7 will be
televised nationally, including Miami-Virginia Tech, the Big XII
title game, the Southeastern Conference title game and the
traditional Army-Navy game.
Finals start shortly after the game at all of these schools.
Football won’t be the only sport where critical games are
played close to finals. The men’s soccer playoffs won’t
start until next weekend, and they continue through Dec. 15, the
weekend after finals. The women’s soccer playoffs end the
weekend before, along with the men’s water polo
championship.
“Fortunately, we’ve done well enough so we get the
first three rounds at home,” UCLA women’s soccer head
coach Jillian Ellis said. “It is very difficult to focus on
soccer and finals before a big match.”
The NCAA didn’t return phone calls inquiring about
scheduling tournaments during finals.
“It would be nice if we could bring the tournament up a
week,” Ellis said. “To be honest, are there really 64
outstanding soccer teams? If we could return to a 48-team field,
this would be sufficed.”
Non-fall sports, like basketball, have problems scheduling
during the season.
The Big Ten Conference routinely schedules road trips for teams
to play on Wednesday and Saturday, and the Big East plays a lot of
Sunday-Tuesday road trips, causing students to miss multiple days
of class, as does the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Some schools from these conferences did not return phone calls
on the matter.
The Pac-10 generally schedules road trips for
Thursday-Saturday.
In addition to the above, Stanford has a policy against
scheduling games during dead week or finals week.
“The policy is good for the students,” said Stanford
women’s basketball assistant coach Karen Middleton, who also
makes the team’s schedule. “We may only miss one or two
days of class in the entire fall quarter.”
For a Thursday-Saturday road trip, the team would leave on
Wednesday, and miss class on Thursday. There aren’t many
classes on Fridays at Stanford, meaning they miss only one day of
class.
Stanford also went against the norm in football, scheduling only
11 games this year instead of 12 or 13, like most of the teams in
the country.
“The university administration, along with the athletic
director, determined that an 11-game schedule is sufficient,”
said Gary Migdol, assistant athletic director at Stanford.
“Football season is very time-consuming for our
student-athletes.”
In both men’s and women’s basketball, the tournament
is played in March, when schools on the quarter system, like UCLA
and Stanford, have finals, and schools on the semester system have
midterms.
“Fortunately for us, professors are very
cooperative,” Middleton said. “They let our players fax
in exams and e-mail assignments.”
Still, no matter what schools do, student-athletes finding time
for their sport and their academics will always be a problem.
“Every game affects study habits,” said Tyson
Clayton, a third-year offensive guard on the UCLA football team.
“You’ve got to learn to get it done.”