In the Pac-12’s statement on Friday, in which the conference announced a league-only game schedule as an adjustment to the reality of COVID-19, it was stated that details on the schedule would be announced no later than July 31.
A likely outcome: Expect the details to emerge in the final few days of July. The league does not have to commit to arriving at these details or releasing them in a few days or a week. A decision DID have to be made fairly quickly on starting the season. Now that the Pac-12 and Big Ten have moved to the conference-only format, that box has been checked. All the Power Five conferences now know we won’t have a 12-game season. The ceiling looks like 10 games, which means a lot of nonconference games are in the process of being removed from schedules. This is moving college football toward the same shared place: A planned start date in the middle of September, with the season pushed back one or two weeks. The ACC, Big 12, and SEC might not release an intended plan right away, on the heels of what the Pac-12 and Big Ten have done, but they now know they are working in the same general ballpark of mid-September. This has been established.
Given that degree of (general, if not specific) clarity, all of the Power Five conferences are best served by waiting a few weeks to finalize and announce their revised schedule plans. It is now a point of general agreement in the college football industry that the sport is imperiled for the coming autumn, and that all the main stakeholders need the COVID-19 trends to improve in each conference’s geographic footprint in order for playing games to become realistic. The sport is trying to buy time; this is part of the reasoning behind chopping off two nonconference games, moving to a 10-game schedule, and starting later in September. Therefore, if the Pac-12 says to not expect schedule details later than July 31, that also means one shouldn’t expect details earlier than Monday, July 27 or thereabouts.
So — as I write this piece on Sunday, July 12 — the league has 15 to 19 days to iron out the details in its revised schedule.
What has to be part of this schedule? We can deal with many different components in these next few weeks. In this piece, we’ll focus on one specific item: Have built-in and coordinated idle weeks for Pac-12 teams.
Example: If Washington and California are going to play in Week 1 of the revised schedule, they both need to have a shared idle week a few weeks later. That way, if their original date can’t be kept due to COVID-19 outbreaks, they can make it up a few weeks later.
More broadly, Pac-12 teams playing in Week 1 would have an idle week in Week 4 so that postponed games can be made up. Teams playing in Week 2 would have a shared idle week in Week 5… and so on.
You might be thinking, “Wait. If there are multiple makeups, we’ll never get the season finished.”
Well, yes. That’s part of the new normal… or rather, the new world in which nothing is normal and we shouldn’t proceed in accordance with a normal set of expectations or a hope that we will get a normal gameday experience.
All of this assumes that we will even HAVE football to play and watch, which is hardly a guarantee at this point.
Downscale your expectations. That doesn’t mean you should give up on seeing any college football in a few months; it does mean you should accept a lot of stops and starts and irregularities.
Pac-12 schedule makers need to account for plot complications. That is how they can honor this very complex and difficult situation.