Following in the footsteps of the ACC and the Mountain West, the Pac-12 tallied a cancellation before its first game was played. The league announced Wednesday that Saturday's Washington-Cal game has been canceled and, due to the league's late start, will not be made up.
While that's nothing new in this strange season, the way this one was canceled is quite different.
In announcing the game's cancelation, the Pac-12 confirmed that a single positive case was what killed the game. Further reporting indicated that single case was asymptomatic.
Obviously, it wasn't that single case but the contract tracing required thereafter that canceled the game. The Pac-12 requires at least 53 scholarship players available to play a game.
This leads to one of two conclusions:
1) Either Cal did something very, very wrong relative to its peers in isolating its players so that one positive case could be deemed a "close contact" to 30 or more of his peers.
or
2) The way the Pac-12 defines "close contact" (and by Pac-12 we mean the states and municipalities in which the league exists) is far stricter than the other conferences, and so the Pac-12 hardly stands a chance at staging anything close to a complete season.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.
Update: It seems Option 2 was the winner here.