Pac-12 Conference Moving to Conference-Only Schedule for Fall Sports
The Pac-12 CEO group has announced that they will schedule only conference games for their fall sports. This affects the conference's football, men's and women's soccer, and volleyball schedules for the fall.
From the conference release:
The Pac-12 CEO Group announced today that the fall season for several Pac-12 sports, including football, men’s and women’s soccer and women’s volleyball, would schedule Conference-only games, and that it is delaying the start of mandatory athletic activities, until a series of health and safety indicators, which have recently trended in a negative direction, provided sufficient positive data to enable a move to a second phase of return-to-play activities. The CEO Group made clear that it hopes to play football and all other fall sports provided that it can meet the health and safety needs of its student-athletes and obtain appropriate permissions from state and local health authorities. Today’s decision will result in the start dates for the impacted sports being delayed. The decision is effective immediately across all Pac-12 member universities and was made following a meeting of the Pac-12 CEO Group earlier today.
With this, Cal football's road trip to Allegiant Stadium on August 29th, as well as home dates with Cal Poly and TCU, have been cancelled.
In addition, the Pac-12 announced that a new schedule will be announced no later than July 31st. This move delays the start of mandatory sports activities, which were scheduled to start July 13th for most teams. Cal, who originally had a week 0 game, was scheduled to start those activities on the 6th.
This move follows the Ivy League cancelling fall sports earlier this week, along with the Big 10 Conference moving to a conference only schedule, which affected Oregon and Washington, who had games against Ohio State and Michigan respectively.
Student-athletes who choose not to participate in athletic activities will have their scholarships honored and will remain in good standing with their teams.
The hope for this move is that it buys the conference more time to deal with troubling COVID-19 trends, especially in the state of Arizona and in the Los Angeles area. It also gives the conference as a whole more control, to standardize protocols around travel, workouts, and more.
