Update: The Pac-12 has made the move official, moving to conference-only seasons for football and other sports.
“The health and safety of our student-athletes and all those connected to Pac-12 sports continues to be our number one priority,” said Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott. “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.”
The conference says it will provide details on conference-only schedules no later than July 31.
The Pac-12 will soon announce it is moving to a conference-only season this fall, according to multiplereports on Friday evening.
The move, obviously, comes one day after the Big Ten made a similar move and two days after the Ivy League officially canceled its fall season.
Though two Power 5 leagues have adopted conference-only schedules in the past 24 hours, they will remain the only two, at least for the near-term future. The ACC announced Friday it will not make any determinations about the fall until late July, and the SEC and Big 12 expressed a miffed bewilderment following the early-July timing of the Big Ten's announcement yesterday. SEC ADs are scheduled to discuss their fall plans on Monday.
The reason a conference would move to a league-only season is to set a standardized testing level that it would not be able to enforce on non-conference partners, while also providing the real estate to move conference games to early September and create room on the schedule in the event of cancellations.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.