COVID knocks Washington out of Pac-12 final; Oregon in

SEATTLE » Washington has pulled out of the Pac12 football championship game due to COVID-19 issues, and Oregon will play No. 13 USC for the conference title Friday instead.

Washington (3-1) announced Monday it is withdrawing from the championship game after determining the Huskies did not have at least 53 scholarship players available and did not meet the minimum number of scholarship athletes at specific positions.

Coach Jimmy Lake said the entire team is isolating as a precaution and another round of testing for the team is scheduled for Tuesday. Lake said Washington did not expect to have any offensive linemen available to play this week because of positive tests and contact tracing.

“(The players) were completely crushed that we could not play last week, and they are devastated now that we cannot play this Friday,” Lake said. “So we’re extremely excited at the possibility of getting everybody healthy first and foremost, and then seeing which game that is and trying to go out there and bring that bowl game championship trophy back here.”

Washington’s protocol requires consecutive days of no new positive tests before the team can resume football activities.

Washington had to cancel its game last weekend against Oregon (3-2) that would have determined the Pac-12 North champion due to COVID-19 cases in the program. Rob Scheidegger, Washington’s associate athletic director for health and wellness, said that while the Huskies have dealt with sporadic positive cases for a couple of weeks, there was a spike last Tuesday that led to last week’s pause in practice.

“At that point, the reason why we were being super proactive is because we wanted to be able to play against Oregon and obviously we wanted to be able to play moving forward,” Scheidegger said. “But we want to do that the right way. ... Our path back was to wait until our tests brought back negative results and we just haven’t been able to get to the point where we have all negative results on our tests.”

Washington was named Pac-12 North champ by virtue of having a better winning percentage than Oregon. The Huskies had games against California and Oregon canceled due to COVID-19 issues, and their game with Washington State became a game against Utah due to the Cougars’ virus problems.

The Ducks take a twogame losing streak into the title game, and Colorado is left without an opponent this weekend.

The Pac-12 scheduled games for its teams not involved in the championship and had planned to have Oregon and Colorado (4-1,

3-1 Pac-12), second to USC in the South, meet Saturday at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

If USC had not been able to play, Colorado would have been its replacement.

There are no Pac-12 teams available for Colorado to play. Sunday, just a few hours after the Pac

12 released its final-week matchups, the game between Arizona and California was canceled due to virus-related issues with both schools.