COLLEGE SPORTS: No Colorado football or basketball in 2020 as Pac-12 shuts down sports until January.
COVID-19 did what even two World Wars could not Tuesday: Shut down University of Colorado athletic competitions for the better part of a calendar year.
The Pac-12 announced Tuesday that all sports, including football in the fall and men’s and women’s basketball in the winter, will not begin competition before Jan. 1, 2021, because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
“The Pac-12 presidents and chancellors reached the decision today that we felt was best for the health and safety of our student-athletes,” CU chancellor Phil DiStefano said in a statement.
“We know the postponement of competition is painful for our fans, alumni, donors and, most of all, our student-athletes who have worked so hard to prepare for the season under extremely difficult circumstances.”
The decision was announced after a Tuesday meeting of the Pac-12 CEO group, a consortium of league presidents and chancellors. The group voted unanimously to postpone all sports in 2020 due to the health risks related to COVID-19.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said during a media conference call Tuesday, “and we don’t have every question answered right now.”
Tuesday’s announcement puts the start of new CU football coach Karl Dorrell’s debut season in limbo, although league officials say they’re hoping for it to be held in the spring. It also will significantly delay the start of the season for longtime Buffs men’s basketball coach Tad Boyle.
“Unlike professional sports, college sports cannot operate in a bubble,” Scott said via a prepared statement. “We will continue to monitor the situation and when conditions change we will be ready to explore all options to play the impacted sports in the new calendar year.
“We know that this is a difficult day for our student-athletes, and our hearts go out to them and their families. We have made clear that all of their scholarships will be guaranteed, and that as a conference we are strongly encouraging the NCAA to grant them an additional year of eligibility.”
The Pac-12’s decision falls in tandem with its longest Power 5 conference partner, the Big Ten, whose chief administrators also voted Tuesday to move football out of the autumn.
The Buffaloes join Colorado State University, Air Force, Wyoming, the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado School of Mines as regional college football programs that will likely adopt a spring 2021 schedule.
The Mountain West, of which the CSU, Air Force and Wyoming are members, announced Monday afternoon that it was nixing football in the autumn, becoming the second Football Bowl Subdivision conference to do so.
The schedule shift means 2020 will be the first calendar year at CU without football since 1889. It’s the first time since the school’s intercollegiate athletic program was established in 1890 that an entire fall season has been postponed.
It will also be the latest start to a Buffs football campaign in program history. The 1918 season, when an influenza pandemic also wreaked havoc with schedules and mass gatherings, wound up lasting five games in a three-week window from Nov. 16 to Dec. 7.
The Pac-12’s decision on delaying the start of 2020-21 winter sports went a step further than its Big Ten peers, as the latter league said the conditions for those seasons would be “evaluated” relative to circumstances.
The CU men’s basketball team is coming off a 21-11 season and likely would have been selected for the 2020 NCAA Tournament before the pandemic forced the cancellation of that event.
The Buffaloes, with the return of senior-to-be point guard McKinley Wright, are expected to contend for a berth in the 2021 iteration of March Madness — assuming the tourney can be held.
The league’s announcement Tuesday was the latest radical shift in what’s become a summer of evershifting dates in Boulder.
Until early July, the hope was for the Buffs to open 2020 at Fort Collins on Sept. 5 in a Rocky Mountain
Showdown tussle with rival CSU. On July 10, the Pac-12 announced it was cancelling all nonconference dates and moving forward with a conference-only schedule.
On July 31, the league released a revised 10-game slate that would open in late September and leave flex dates for games missed because of COVID-19. On the new schedule, CU was to begin the campaign at defending league champion Oregon on Sept. 26.
Dorrell was hired Feb. 23 to replace Mel Tucker after the latter’s shocking, middle-of-the-night departure to Michigan State earlier that month.
A former CU assistant under Bill McCartney and Rick Neuheisel, the 57year-old Dorrell was preparing for his first spring practices in mid-March when COVID-19 caused a rolling cancellation of sporting events and large gatherings across the country. Because of the coronavirus, the new Buffs coach has yet to oversee a fullsquad, padded practice at CU nearly six months into his tenure.