How do Big Ten and Pac-12 cancellations affect other Power 5 decisions?
Yahoo Sports College Reporter Pete Thamel explains how the Big Ten and Pac-12 came to the decisions to cancel their 2020 fall football seasons and how those decisions will affect the ACC, SEC and Big 12 moving forward.
Video Transcript
PETE THAMEL: This is Pete Thamel, college football writer with Yahoo Sports, coming to you on a seismic day in college football. Both the Big Ten Conference and the Pac-12 Conference announced on Tuesday that they will not be playing college football this fall in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The two decisions came in very different ways.
The Big Ten decision came after 24 hours of tumult and much public carping from prominent coaches in the Big Ten like Jim Harbaugh and Scott Frost. The Big Ten decision appeared inevitable Sunday night, was on the cusp, and then went through a little bit of a muddled period on Monday. In the end, the Big Ten arrived at the decision on the advice of its medical counsel.
Not long after, the Pac-12 followed suit. Larry Scott's league has been perhaps the most inhibited by COVID. The four California schools and two Arizona, schools because of the outbreaks in those areas, have had varying amounts of difficulties even starting practice like activities because of local rules and regulations. Therefore, the Pac-12 season getting pushed off to the spring has always felt like a bit of an inevitability.
The combination of these two leagues making these announcements on Tuesday shifts the onus and focus to the Big 12. Later Tuesday evening, the Big 12 is expected have a conference call to discuss the future. Think of the Big 12 like Ohio or Florida in a presidential election. How the Big 12 goes could well determine the rest of the sport.
With three of the five remaining Power Five leagues still planning on playing, they have a chance to keep pushing forward. If the Big 12 also flips in the near future, it would put a special pressure on the SEC and the ACC. Right now, the SEC and the ACC have strongly maintained that they plan on moving ahead. I had an ACC source tells me this afternoon that their plan was put in place to be able to attempt to get through the first couple weeks when students return to campus. He doesn't see any reason why the ACC shouldn't push forward and attempt to do what it set out to do. In other words, nothing has really changed significantly medically in the past few days for the league to not go through with their plan.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey on Monday said on Twitter that the league had been very deliberate. And he essentially set a course that the SEC was not going to be impacted by the Big Ten's decision and was going to go ahead and push on on its own path. As of Tuesday afternoon, 53 of the 130 schools that play FBS football have announced that they're canceling the season this fall-- four of the major conferences and then a handful of independents. As a hectic week moves on, the only logical question becomes, who's next?
