It's time for another one of my little furloughs, which will begin as soon as I hit the publish button on this entry.

What that means is no entries on here for a couple of days. As noted last time, if anything really significant happens, we'll figure out a way to pass it along on here (it just won't be me).

What I'd like to do, however, is throw this entry open for more questions, which I'll use for the June Q-and-A blog posts (and I know I still have a few from May to get to, but there may be some new ones you have). I'll start those sometime over the weekend or early next week.

Also, for discussion purposes to keep the blog going, here's a good look from ESPN's Ted Miller at the continuing debate over ending round-robin scheduling in the Pac-10. You can read what Miller wrote on the pros and cons so I won't repeat all that here.

What I will add is that if the Pac-10 goes back to eight conference games, what it likely means for UW is another non-conference home game against a team like Utah State every year, which would obviously take the place every year of a conference game --- and every other year of a conference home game. What it also means is that UW would likely begin missing the California and Arizona schools.

Last time, when the Pac-10 went to eight games, it devised a system where every school would miss every other school --- except for its natural rival --- twice over a 16-year period, doing so in consecutive years. That's why UW didn't play UCLA in 1991 and 1992, for instance, as those were the two straight years it didn't play the Bruins, and why it didn't play USC in 1999 and 2000 (in retrospect, years when it would have been good for the Huskies to play the Trojans).

But schools didn't like having to miss games against schools they had played forever --- Oregon didn't want to have years where it skipped the Huskies (if you recall, the two didn't play in 2001, the year the Ducks went 11-1), USC and UCLA didn't want to interrupt long-standing rivalries with the Bay Area schools, that sort of thing.

So if the eight-game schedule returns, I imagine that the Northwest schools would probably still play each other every year, and what would happen is schools like UW and WSU would instead miss out on a lot of games against the California and Arizona schools.

So the advantage would be an easier route to six wins and a bowl game --- and maybe some better odds getting into BCS bowls.

The minus is the conference not being able to claim the moral high ground on scheduling anymore, and more pragmatically, the loss of good home game every other year against a conference team and likely long absences getting teams like UCLA and USC at Husky Stadium. Recall that under the old system, UCLA played at Husky Stadium in 1990, then not again until 1994. Same happened with USC, which played at Husky Stadium in 1997, then not again until 2001. Expect that again if this goes through.

Speaking of absences, mine begins now. See you again in a few days.