Pac-12 decision on fall season will come too late for College Football Playoff
The Pac-12’s decision on a fall season restart won’t come until next Thursday.
Friday’s meeting of the Pac-12 CEO group resulted in good news and bad news.
The good news? It’s increasingly clear the Pac-12 will indeed restart its 2020 season sometime this fall.
The bad news (for Pac-12 fans at least)? The conference says it won’t make its official decision on the new season until next Thursday. That means the chance of a Pac-12 representative in the College Football Playoff is slim at best.
The Pac-12 is targeting an early November start.
The CEO group meeting on Friday focused in on the possibility of playing games beginning on Nov. 7, according to Bruce Feldman.
There had been murmurings of a Halloween restart in the west, but that would have required practices to begin by next week. The Pac-12 has consistently said they will need six weeks of training camp to get players safely ready to play.
An Oct. 31 start would give the conference time to hold eight games before the College Football Playoff selection committee makes its final vote. Starting on Nov. 7 would mean a likely seven-game schedule, which is unlikely to be a large enough sample size for a playoff representative.
At least a New Year’s Six bid, and the money that comes with it, may still be on the table.
Even though members of the conference like Oregon, Oregon State, USC and UCLA were able to rush on Wednesday to gain state-level approval for practices, there are still hurdles to clear in the conference.
For instance, Stanford and Cal will need “a few days” to work with local health officials for approval, according to Jon Wilner. Until they get it, the Pac-12 certainly won’t let other programs get a head start on beginning training camp.
If the Bay Area is causing a bit of a hold-up, it’s still disappointing to see the Pac-12 wait until Thursday to reconvene. Every second counts when it comes to getting set for a fall season in a few weeks.
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