Could money possibly be a consideration?

From California Today of the NY Times:

Pac-12 football is coming back, or so the league hopes. The conference, which includes Stanford, Southern California, Cal and U.C.L.A., announced last week that it would try to play football beginning Nov. 6, a reversal of its Aug. 11 decision not to compete this autumn. Alan Blinder, a sports reporter for The Times, talked with Larry Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, on Wednesday. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation...

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...Cal’s athletic director said that playing football could help the school avoid a $20 million loan. Why should we believe Pac-12 leaders when they say the decision has nothing to do with money?

I think everyone understands that, regardless of whether we play sports or not, this is a significant financial crisis for athletic departments. The decisions that are being made are based on health and safety, well-being and other related issues, and the delta between how much you’re going to lose is just not a significant factor in the discussion. There’s a major loss regardless.

How much will Pac-12 schools collect because of football?

We are going to play a little bit more than half of the games we normally play. We’ll satisfy most of our obligations to ESPN and Fox, which provide the lion’s share of our television revenues, so we’ll be receiving significant amounts. But there will still be significant shortfalls because we won’t have all of the games and we won’t have a lot of football games for the Pac-12 Network.

But it sounds like you all haven’t settled on an exact figure.

Correct.

The league considered playing early in 2021. Why this fall?

It’s obviously advantageous for us to play when the rest of college football is playing. There were also two health and safety components as we thought about playing post-January. Playing any significant number of games, there were some concerns about how it might affect the preparedness and health and safety for the student-athletes for the 2021 season. How many football games are you going to play in one calendar year?

The other, as we talked to our university leadership and health and safety experts, while no one’s got a crystal ball, there were certainly strong voices saying there’s nothing to suggest there’s anything about the pandemic that’s going to be any better in January than it is now. We continue to learn with every week that goes by, but with flu season coming, with what we’re seeing, there’s no data to suggest that things are going to be safer or better then. Once we got comfort on the gating issues, everything kind of lined up to suggest we play now...

Full story at https://tinyurl.com/yadzq4yw