UH, A&M lose football games to Pac-12 move
Scratch off one game from the 2020 University of Houston football schedule.
The Pac-12 on Friday announced it will play conference-only games for fall sports, cancelling the Cougars’ Sept. 12 game against Washington State in Pullman, Wash.
The move by the Pac-12 comes one day after a similar decision by the Big Ten, which made the scheduling adjustment for all fall sports due to concerns over a spike in the novel coronavirus throughout the nation.
“We are aware of today’s announcement by the Pac-12 Conference to pursue a conference-only schedule this season, which affects our Sept. 12 game at Washington
State,” UH athletics director Chris Pezman said in a statement. “The University of Houston will continue to work with the American Athletic Conference and its members to focus on the scheduling guidelines for all fall sports in 2020.”
Texas A&M’s rematch with former Big 12 foe Colorado will not happen. The Aggies were scheduled to host the Buffaloes on Sept. 19 at Kyle Field until Friday’s decision.
Other Power Five conferences — SEC, Big 12 and ACC — are expected to make similar announcements. The American Athletic Conference, of which UH is a member, has yet to announce its plans.
UH is scheduled to begin the season at home Sept. 3 against Rice. Other non-conference games that could be impacted include a Sept. 26 home game against North Texas and Oct. 16 road game against BYU. The Pac-12 announcement came after a meeting of the Pac-12 CEO Group on Friday.
“The health and safety of our student-athletes and all those connected to Pac-12 sports continues to be our No. 1 priority,” Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said in a statement. “Our decisions have and will be guided by science and data, and based upon the trends and indicators over the past days, it has become clear that we need to provide ourselves with maximum flexibility to schedule, and to delay any movement to the next phase of return-to-play activities.”
On Wednesday, the Ivy League became the first Division I conference to suspend all fall sports until at least January, leaving open the possibility of moving some sports to the spring if the pandemic is under better control.
The Pac-12’s decision covers football, women’s and women’s soccer and women’s volleyball. Conference-only schedules will be announced no later than July 31.
The Pac-12 is also delaying the start of mandatory athletic activities until health and safety indicators become more positive.
Athletes recently began returning to campuses for voluntary workouts, but many schools have scaled back as more than a dozen schools have reported positive COVID-19 tests among athletes in the past month.
The NCAA shorted its member schools $375 million in scheduled payouts due to the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament and schools across the country have been hit with massive budget shortfalls as college sports remain on hold.
Stanford eliminated 11 of its 36 varsity sports and at least 171 fouryear schools have eliminated sports during the pandemic.
A shift to conference-only schedules will likely have a ripple across the college sports landscape. Smaller schools that rely on revenue from guarantee football games against Power Five schools could be shorted millions of dollars.