Pac12’ s pandemic football in limbo
Stanford coach David Shaw has been waiting to learn if four players, including his starting quarterback, can play a game Saturday.
He said Thursday afternoon that he hoped for clarification in anywhere from “12 to 24 hours.”
Cal coach Justin Wilcox has been waiting to learn if his entire team can play a game Saturday.
As of Thursday evening, he was still waiting.
Is this a good idea or is it idiotic? Trying to smash a sevengame season into seven weeks with no wiggle room as — in a development that has been fully predicted by scientists — coronavirus numbers
spike around the country?
It has to seem idiotic, exasperating and unfair if you’re a Cal fan ( though to their credit the Cal fans I know seem to have the balance of pandemic vs. football in full perspective). Wilcox has expressed frustration and anger with the process, in which his entire defensive line was placed in quarantine for 14 days. One positive test wiped out a full game and could wipe out two.
Meanwhile, Utah, which had a serious outbreak on its team, had a player hospitalized and saw its opener against Arizona canceled, is still planning to travel to Los Angeles to play UCLA on Saturday. Oregon State announced Thursday one positive test and an additional three other players under quarantine yet plans to go ahead with its Saturday game against Washington.
There seem to be two issues at play: contact tracing for the virus and contact tracing for who is responsible for making protocol decisions. Though Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines are in place, their enforcement seems to fluctuate based on where a team is located. The Cal fingers seem to be pointing at Berkeley health officials, though Berkeley health officials say they are following strict protocols that exempt no one.
Is all of this anxiety and effort worth it? The number of resources being spent on testing, tracing and trying to squeeze in Pac12 football surely offset whatever revenues will be produced by such a woeful little season, played in front of almost completely empty stadiums.
Shaw, whose team managed to play ( and get crushed) in a game at Oregon on Saturday despite the positive test and resulting quarantines, is taking a Zen approach.
“I don’t have a level of frustration,” Shaw said. “We knew this from the beginning. When we started to have conversations in June and July about a football season in a pandemic, the word everyone used was ‘ disruption.’ There was no way we could play an entire season without some form of disruption — whether games postponed, games canceled, campuses shut down,
NFL franchises shut down. Everyone knew this was a possibility.
“In the grand scheme of things, we knew this is what it was going to be. Which is why every conference set up different rules in how to find a conference champion.”
For Cal, any dream of a conference championship could be an impossibly long shot. If Saturday’s Arizona State game is canceled, Cal will — at most — play five games of a sevengame season.
This is not the SEC or the Big Ten, where college football is a religion and crazy amounts of money are at stake. This is the Pac12, a Power 5 conference in name only. And while one shouldn’t diminish the amount of money at play in Pac12 football, it pales compared to the alpha conferences.
All of college football is a mess. At least 57 games had been canceled as of Thursday afternoon, including Ohio State-Maryland due to an outbreak on the Terrapins. Coaches and key players have tested positive, students have illadvisedly rushed the field, the schedule is woefully out of balance.
The Pac12 started late, thinking its antigen testing plan would be the cureall to pulling off a season. But that isn’t happening. And now it has no room for makeup dates and no space for error, just as the pandemic is worsening.
The players obviously think it is worth it. It gives them a respite from a strained, strange world of Zoom classes and social distancing. But winter is coming, and things will almost certainly get worse in the coming weeks.
“I’ll stay away from ‘ Game of Thrones’ overtones,” Shaw said. “Our guys are just appreciative. They want to play and they’re so excited. … You’ll go through something uncomfortable to get to your passion, and that’s where our guys are.
“It’s tough for 18to 22yearolds to consistently do everything right, so we keep putting that in front of them. That this is not just about them. It’s about their teammates, about our entire community, staying safe and being smart … and to realize that this is a difficult spot for everyone in America.”
It is a difficult spot for everyone: nurses, teachers, doctors, caregivers. But there’s just something about trying to shoehorn in a college football season that seems decidedly unessential.