SAN DIEGO SPORTS ET CETERA : Aztecs Avoid Padres, Move UTEP Game

San Diego State has resolved a scheduling conflict with the Padres at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium by moving its home football game with Texas El Paso next season to Nov. 24.

The game had been scheduled to be played Sept. 22, but the Padres took that Saturday night date for the second of a three-game series with the Cincinnati Reds.

The switch of the UTEP game to what had been an open date for SDSU was made this week during the Western Athletic Conference winter meetings in Denver, Jeff Hurd, the WAC’s associate commissioner, said Thursday.

Hurd also said that conference athletic directors voted unanimously to return to round-robin scheduling in football beginning with the 1991 season. This will end a scheduling format adopted in 1986, and instituted this past season, that allowed four schools each season to play seven rather than eight conference games.

This allowed schools to use the extra date to schedule another nonconference game, but Hurd said athletic directors were concerned that the uneven number of conference games put schools at a disadvantage when it came to determining the WAC champion and the Holiday Bowl berth.

SDSU used the uneven scheduling to eliminate a home-and-home series with Colorado State for 1989 and 1990. The change will not affect the Aztecs until 1993, when they again would have been permitted to drop a conference game.

The plan still must be approved by the conference presidents at their annual meeting in June 8-11 in Tucson, Ariz.

In other action, the 1991 conference basketball tournament was awarded to Wyoming.