It may be impossible for most of the Pac-12 to see any benefit whatsoever in delaying the 2020 football season, but as GoAzCats.com Senior Editor Matt Moreno describes, the University of Arizona just may be the exception in this league.
DevilsDigest: What are your thoughts on the Pac-12’s decision to postpone fall football?
Matt Moreno: “When you look at the Pac-12 medical report, that’s a big deal when you also look at the Big Ten and how they’ve mishandled things. They take a lot of flak in that conference for how they rolled out this process. The Pac-12, for once, it’s leading the way because of how it has approached this decision. Maybe people disagree with it. But, based on what I’ve seen, I just don’t think it would be possible to play a Fall season right now. And so, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision, especially for us in Arizona. We’ve seen how things have spiked and how the process has gone.
“Kevin Sumlin spoke this week, and he doesn’t sound convinced that everybody else is going to able to play a full Fall season. So, I think he agrees with that decision. He was disappointed about it, you could tell. And he expressed that, but as he sits back and analyzes it for himself, I think he thinks it’s the right decision. He believes it’s going to be difficult for the other Power 5 conferences to get football going this Fall. So, we’ll see what happens.
“With so many different opinions coming from all over the place, they relied on the health and safety and the doctors and science and arrived at that decision. The biggest challenge now is going to be to see how they can come up with a spring season. Obviously, with the NCAA’s (eligibility) decision, figuring out what it means for the incoming freshmen and then, the outgoing seniors…players are going have to make a decision.
“At Arizona, we saw that last week with Collin Schooler leaving, and he was Arizona’s most important defensive player, maybe their most important player overall. He decided, ‘you know what, I’m going to go try and play somewhere else. I’m going to enter the transfer portal.’ That’s a huge loss for Arizona. He said he didn’t want to play in the spring. And he cited that as a reason for making the decision to enter the transfer portal and see if he can find a school that will take him in one of those other conferences that are playing this Fall. So, Arizona has obviously been negatively impacted by that in a big way so far, but we’ll see what happens once the spring arrives.”
DevilsDigest: How does this decision affect U of A football?
Matt Moreno: “Ultimately, I think it could be a positive for them in terms of just their overall roster growth and development. Also, it all depends on how they’re able to work with recruiting. It’s been pretty clear what Kevin Sumlin and his staff have been trying to do. There have been a lot of departures. There’s been maybe a little bit of fracturing within the team where you see a lot of the players from the past coaching regime taking off. Tony Fields has left. Scottie Young has left. Those are two key players on the defense. But those aren’t guys that Kevin Sumlin and his staff recruited.
“Maybe some of the younger players now are going to be able to come in and play right away. These are guys Kevin Sumlin, and his staff has recruited, and I think that’s been the plan. There’s obviously a whole new defensive staff. I think that’s one of the other bigger challenges for this group right now. They only had four spring practices to work with the team before everything was shut down. So, I think that’s a big challenge, but that could also be another positive for this team getting some more time to work with the new coaches and figure things out because I don’t think they will be ready to play right now. Obviously, Arizona as one of those teams that were going to play in week zero, so their first game would have been this week (against Hawaii on August 29th), if everything would have held true. So, it’s going to be a little bit of a positive for this team because there are so many new pieces, so many new players they’re trying to fit in that they can actually, get some more time to really iron out some things and go in a positive direction.”
DevilsDigest: What were the storylines you were looking forward to covering with this U of A team?
Matt Moreno: “How the defense was going to come together because they had a lot of issues over the last several years. I don’t know if I’ve ever covered an Arizona team that really, truly had a strong defense, maybe that 2014 season when Scooby Wright was going out, flying all over the place and Arizona won the Pac-12 south. That was probably the best defensive team that they’ve had. But it wasn’t as though they were a dominant defense. They had a very dominant player, but overall, who was just a lot of making the right play at the right time. And so, now they make this transition to Paul Rhoads and his defensive group. They fired a couple of coaches during the season last year and eventually had to replace the entire staff when Demetrice Martin went to Colorado just before spring ball started. So that was going to be one of the big things to watch this Fall was how that defense came together, especially when you consider they didn’t have very much time together in the spring. The defense was going to a different scheme, a 3-4 under Paul Rhoads, so wanted to see how that was going to come together.
“Offensively, with (quarterback) Grant Gunnell, you wanted to see how he’s going to perform. He had so much acclaim as a recruit. He had so many offers to go to other places and ended up going to Arizona. He was able to get on the field last year but had to split time with Khalil Tate, and they had already built the offense around Tate. It wasn’t a Grant Gunnel offense, and now it’s going to be interesting to see how things change with Gunnell, now that (offensive coordinator) Noel Mazzone has ‘his guy’ at the quarterback position. How does that change the offense? How much more passing are they going to do? How that’s going to impact the running game and the running back group, which is their strongest group, maybe overall on the entire team? It’s a good group where they can go six players deep. It will be interesting to see how the coaches mold this offense around Grant Gunnell and seeing what he can do as a full-time starter with more pressure on him.”
DevilsDigest: How does the conference’s decision affect Arizona’s 2021 and 2022 recruiting classes?
Matt Moreno: “Obviously, they had a very, very slow start…them and Washington State were the last two Power 5 schools to have a commit in the 2021 class. And then all of a sudden, you fast forward two months later, and they have more recruits and more commits than really most anybody in the country. So, they’ve only lost one commit so far, and still have 20 commits in the ’21 class. They already have two commits for 2022, and both are in-state guys who are going to be a big deal for Arizona being able to lock down total talent in Tucson and in the greater Phoenix area. So, so far, the season delay hasn’t shown any signs of having a negative impact.
“A lot of recruits that Arizona is targeting right now, they don’t have a ton of other Power 5 offers. So, I don’t see the delay having a huge negative impact on decommits and things like that. I know there’s been times on message boards and elsewhere where fans are talking about commits going to look elsewhere because they don’t want to go to a conference where they aren’t even playing football this Fall. But I think it’s a different case. I think for Arizona, the players that they’re targeting right now just don’t have a ton of other offers. I believe they’re going to stay locked in because they’re uncertain as to what’s going to happen. Kevin Sumlin is still in favor of having the early signing period in December. He thinks it gives recruits like that a chance to really lock in their commitments and not have to worry about what’s going to happen the rest of this year and then going into next spring. I don’t think the delayed season is going to have a huge, negative impact on them. I think it’s going to be a positive, but we’ll have to see what that means in the coming months.”
DevilsDigest: Do you think the Power 5 conferences planning to still play in the Fall will be able to pull it off and if they do, how will it affect the Pac-12?
Matt Moreno: “I think that would be the worst if they’re able to finish their full season. I think starting the season (as scheduled), it will look bad for the other conferences, but we already know that they’re going to try. They’re obviously only a couple of weeks away from starting the season. I think they’re at least going to give it a shot. I don’t have a ton of confidence that it’s going to end, that they’re going to be able to get the complete season that they want.
“You’re already seeing it in other places, where Notre Dame and North Carolina had to roll back their plans in bringing students back to campus. Not every student on campus loves sports. And I think that’s the driving force behind a lot of what we see on the sports side. College sports is the king. But for some people, that isn’t the case, and they’re going to go out and do what they do and probably make things less safe. It’s going to be an issue. It’s going to be hard to sell players and their families on them being the only ones on campus holding up that mantle of being an amateur, student-athlete. It’s hard to say ‘well, why are there other athletes out there but not other students?’
“So, I do think it’s going to be difficult for them to complete a season for these reasons.
But if that does happen, it can be terrible for the Pac-12 and the Big Ten. It could definitely, negatively impact the Pac-12 in a big way. But I also don’t get the sense that it’s going to get to that point. I don’t think Arizona and Kevin Sumlin feel like it’s going to get to that point being in that situation. I think he fully believes that it’s going to be difficult for these other conferences to get a full season and maybe even just getting to start at this point.”
DevilsDigest: How do you feel about the Pac-12’s chances of playing in the spring?
Matt Moreno: “Based on what we’ve seen so far, I don’t have a lot of confidence that it’s going to be able to happen. I think the fact that the Pac-12 wasn’t able to come up with a plan for the Fall, and they had so many months to think about it and plan that out…I don’t think it lends a lot of confidence for them pulling that off in the next several months and getting football season going in the spring.
“There are a lot of questions that still have to be answered. I think you’re going to have a lot of players that opt-out in the spring season no matter what. It’s going to be a mess and impact a lot of what the football season is going to look like. It’s going to become an issue where there are a lot of teams that are struggling to sign players to just have some kind of season in terms of having impact players.
“The leadership of the Pac-12, and (Commissioner) Larry Scott get a lot of negative attention, and in this situation, the conference just wasn’t able to pull off what they said they were going to do. I don’t see a ton of great planning, and obviously, you had a schedule come out less than a couple of weeks before they decided to shut everything down. That’s not a good sign. Based on what I’ve heard on the Arizona side and how everything played out, I don’t have a lot of confidence that they’re going to be able to pull off a season in the spring. Maybe something happens between now and then, perhaps a vaccine comes into play, but I don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of confidence about a season in the spring.”
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(Jesse Morrison contributed to this article)
