BYU Lines Up Game in Record Speed — Huskies Should Keep Cougars on Speed Dial
Buddy, can you spare a game?
With fall camp supposedly a week and a half out, the University of Washington football team has a 10-game schedule drawn up.
The Huskies haven't played a ledger this light in opponents since Sonny Sixkiller's sophomore season in 1970, when they competed in the scaled-down Pacific-8 Conference.
Caught in the middle of a pandemic, the Pac-12 version of the Huskies have gone from a dozen games to this less complicated 10, all against league opponents.
With Major League Baseball struggling to keep the virus in check among its players and canceling games left and right, UW players have to be wondering how many they'll actually play.
At least the guys who aren't outside the stadium, holding up picket signs, have to be debating this.
Let's make a bold pronouncement here: the Huskies won't get all 10 games in as planned.
They'll need to go looking for other opponents.
Such as BYU.
The Cougars, with half of their schedule as an independent wiped out by cancellations, announced they'll open with Navy in Annapolis on Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 7, in a game televised by ESPN.
BYU arranged this game fairly quickly, with no doubt more to come, which is hopeful for everyone.
The Huskies, who haven't had to seek out games on the fly since World War II, are faced with this prospect of a patchwork schedule once again because of a virus that hasn't reached halftime yet.
Opponents such as USC, UCLA and California haven't received permission to reassemble as teams — i.e., people congregating in large numbers — by state officials because of spiking COVID-19 numbers.
The Huskies are scheduled to play Cal in Berkeley on Oct. 10 and USC on Dec. 5 in Los Angeles.
Because of that state's stated aversion to protective masks and social distancing protocols, resulting in large numbers of active virus cases, the UW likely will never travel there in the coming months.
Hello BYU, are you still looking to fill out your schedule?
Last week, as the Pac-12 released these newly arranged 10-game football schedules, commissioner Larry Scott said flatly a team outbreak is expected in the conference.
He hinted in passing that his teams might have to retrace their steps and pursue a non-conference game — after canceling them in July.
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