Pac-12 hoops start delayed but creative plans in place

The Pac-12 did more than cancel the 2020 football season Tuesday; it shuttered competition in all sports for the calendar year.

That includes college basketball.

UCLA in the Wooden Legacy tournament? Not anymore.

Arizona in the NIT Tip-Off? Nope.

Utah in the Bahamas? Washington State and Arizona State in Honolulu? No, no and no.

The Pac-12 won’t play non-conference games in November or December. It won’t play any games, anywhere, anytime until January 2021, at the earliest.

To date, it’s the only power conference to shutter men’s basketball for the rest of the calendar year.

When the Big Ten canceled football on Tuesday — an hour prior to the Pac-12’s announcement — it uttered not a peep about basketball or any other winter season sport.

When the Big East followed with news one day later, it limited the shutdown to fall sports teams and left basketball untouched.

The SEC, ACC and Big 12 have been silent on the state of their hoops.

Make no mistake: The Pac-12 is dangling, alone among the basketball heavyweights in gutting November and December and, as such, vulnerable to criticism.

It looks like the conference doesn’t care as much as its peers.

It looks like there’s no will to plow forward.

“It looks like we’re disorganized,” Arizona coach Sean Miller told the Hotline on Wednesday. “But that’s not the case.”

It’s not the case at all.

With so much media and fan attention fixed on football, key members of the Pac-12 basketball machinery have been working for

months on a strategy to return to the court once the conference’s medical advisory committee signs off on the move.

Since late April, a working group consisting of 24 coaches, athletic directors, basketball administrators and other officials — two from each school — has convened every other week to plot a strategy for the restart.

They were updated regularly by the medical advisors — the same group that assessed health and safety measures for the football operation.

The coaches knew a November-December shutdown was a strong possibility.

They didn’t know the decision would come from the presidents on Tuesday, packaged with the momentous football news.

“It came a little earlier than we anticipated,” said Cal coach Mark Fox, a member of the basketball working group.

“But at the end of the day, the decision was based on science and medicine.”

The news was jarring to the public if only because basketball has been out of the Covid-19 spotlight.

The same concerns about commencing with physical contact in football — the lack of rapid-response testing, the restrictive local health ordinances, the unknowns of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart found in Covid-19 patients) — apply to basketball.

Yes, it’s played with small groups. But it’s indoors with loads of contact and a ball shared by 10 players and officials.

“If it’s not safe for football, which is nose-to-nose, to play before October or November, why would it be safe for basketball to do it, either?” Fox said.

“Basketball is a lot of face-to-face situations that are not just momentary breaks of social distancing.”

The advisory committee believes an improvement in testing and decline in community spread could come to the Pac-12 footprint in the late fall, and the Jan. 1 start date for basketball competition was set with that possibility in mind.

“If you had a normal amount of strength and conditioning work, then you need a minimum of four weeks to practice for them to be ready,” Fox said.

With the absence of normalcy, the working group believes players will need two weeks of conditioning before a month of practice.

“We need to be on the court, for sure, by Thanksgiving,” Fox said, in order to hit the early-January start window.