It’s getting to be that time of year again. Rosters are set, official training is well underway, and no one has had enough time to become a disappointment yet. It’s the sweetest time of year.

Still, there’s plenty to get through between now and the start of the NCAA season, with a little thing called the World Championship hogging our attention for the next three weeks or so, but once elite has exhausted its time in the sun, I’ll get into the usual dissection of freshman classes and team lineups, parsing all the various roster changes, injury retirements, and scandalous dismissals that have taken place since we left the United Factory of 10s last April. But for now, enough teams have finally gotten around to holding themselves upright long enough to release a season schedule that it makes sense to put together the annual composite list.

It’s still a work in progress, with a couple dozen of the usual slowpoke teams still lagging behind, but this is now a mostly complete look at the upcoming 2016 season. All the first-tier teams have released their schedules except Illinois and Penn State. As usual, this schedule will reside at the tab above, where I’ll keep updating it as we get closer to the season and more teams release their slates/learn what time zones are/figure out that their schedules are wrong. (Dear Boise State, if you think you’re going to Utah on January 15th for a meet, you might want to tell Utah that…)

Meets between teams that qualified to the championship last year are in bold for quick reference. This season isn’t all that bad in terms of simultaneous big meets (at least not as bad as last year). The one really bad day (or good day, if you’re an excited person who enjoys things) will be February 26, when LSU/Florida, Georgia/Alabama, and Michigan/Oklahoma overlap to some degree, but it’s not all that dire because not that many people get to watch Oklahoma meets anyway and the SEC meets are somewhat spaced out. Oklahoma/Georgia and Utah/Stanford on February 20th is another squint-worthy overlap, but it’s usually worse.

In terms of strength of schedule, the SEC always wins because of the built-in requirements of having to go against many of the best teams, but UCLA is also trying to shoot the moon with difficult opponents this year, having scheduled non-conference meets with Florida, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Georgia all this season (Alabama, Georgia, and Oklahoma at home). Season-ticketers will get their money’s worth this time.

Other noteworthy quirks in the schedule include NC State competing an exclusively road schedule (save for one not-really-home home meet on senior night) because of renovations to the competition facility, and we also see the return of the Flimsy Excuse for a Trip to Cancun Championship on the first weekend in January, which still no one has offered to take me to. I’m waiting.

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April 15-17 – NCAA Championship (Fort Worth, TX)