COVID-19 disruption has derailed Pac-12 schedule
The Pac-12 might be lagging its peers in the College Football Playoff standings, but it’s more than keeping pace in another area: COVID-19 disruption.
The conference has lost nine games in four weeks since its return in early November, with the USC- Colorado cancelation on Thursday the latest instance.
Meanwhile, the Big Ten has canceled or postponed just five games in six weeks.
And the SEC has lost only 10 games in 10 weeks.
The Pac-12 started later, implemented a more rigorous testing plan, crammed seven games into seven weeks ... and is experiencing more disruption than its peers.
No, this wasn’t supposed to happen.
It looks like the conference waited too long to get started, then returned under a false assumption that its plan would allow a threading of the schedule needle. But at the time of the decision to postpone, in early August, the COVID medical advisory board made its priority clear: Until the Pac-12 could provide daily point-of-care testing for the players — before practice and games — it would not recommend restarting the season.
On Sept. 3, that option arrived in the form of the partnership with Quidel Corp., the San Diego-based diagnostics manufacturer that agreed to provide the conference with daily antigen tests.
Those tests were termed a “game changer” by commissioner Larry Scott, designed to prevent spread within team activities and limit both the need for contact tracing and the potential for large numbers of players to be placed in quarantine.
At least, that’s what conference officials thought would happen.
• Here’s Scott on a Zoom call with the media following the Quidel announcement:
“This daily rapid-result testing — where you can have a high degree of confidence that no player’s going to step on a basketball court or a football field for practice or competition infectious — eliminates a lot of risk factors that we were worried about, especially with the quarantine and close contacting.”
• And here’s Washington physician Dr. Kim Harmon on that same call:
“Theoretically, when they’re out on the field, they’re not infecting each other. That has big implications in terms of who you need to quarantine because, theoretically, there’s an argument to be made that you would not have to quarantine others on the same field or court when somebody becomes positive, because you knew they weren’t infectious when they were playing.”
• And here’s Oregon State physician Dr. Doug Aukerman:
“By doing daily testing, you can essentially narrow the window of when somebody … began to start shedding virus down to probably a 20-to-24 hour window, if not even shorter. The hope is it reduces some of the burden on contact tracing and the community health departments, because you don’t have to go back quite so far as it relates to the athletic realm.
And yet, here we are — barely one month into the season — and the Pac-12 is declaring no contests every few days.
Given the rate of disruption, it should have scheduled seven games in 17 weeks.
Within the daily uncertainty that has swallowed the season, three things are clear:
1. The virus is spreading much more rapidly throughout the Pac-12 footprint than it was in September and October, when the conference was on hiatus.
2. There is no evidence of transmission on the field or within team activities.
Instead, the players become exposed to the virus on campus and in the community.
3. The primary reason for cancellations isn’t the number of positive cases but the amount of players forced into quarantine by the contact-tracing process.