LAS VEGAS — After squeezing in Monday and Tuesday makeup games this season in a mad scramble to restore everyone’s 20-game schedules, the Pac-12 found out they weren’t so bad after all.
In fact, Pac-12 deputy commissioner Jamie Zaninovich said Thursday the conference will explore saving some game inventory permanently for early-week windows that could keep the league’s exposure going all week. The key will be scheduling only games between teams that are relatively close, such as between travel partners or other nearby matchups such as Arizona and a California team.
“Having been forced out of our traditional format has sort of opened everybody’s eyes,” Zaninovich said during a press conference with Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff. “It’s tricky with our geography. There’s a reason we’ve (had) travel partners for so long. But the (weeklong) drumbeat of Pac-12 basketball these past two years because of the rescheduling has really helped us.”
Arizona appears to be at the center of this discussion.
Interest in the Wildcats — by their own fans and those of their opponents alike — helped result in two of their four early-week makeup games (at UCLA and at USC) being picked up on the main ESPN platform. Their Feb. 7 makeup game at ASU went on Fox Sports 1, while UA’s first makeup game — at home against Washington on Jan. 3 — was carried on Pac-12 Networks.
However, that interest also hurt the Wildcats this season, too, one reason why Arizona was able to play just the Washington game between Dec. 22 and Jan. 13.
Arizona’s games with UCLA (Dec. 30), USC (Jan. 2) and ASU (Jan. 8) were all postponed because of those teams’ COVID pauses. Because the Sun Devils’ pause came right as the Los Angeles schools were returning from theirs, it was possible UA could have quickly made up games with UCLA (probably on Jan. 6) and USC (Jan. 8).
But that was when the Los Angeles schools were not allowing fans at the height of the Omicron surge and, well, a lot of fans were expected to watch both USC and UCLA host Arizona.
So UCLA wound up hosting Long Beach State on Jan. 6 without fans, while both USC and UCLA hosted the Oregon schools without fans during the second week of January. Neither team hosted Arizona until fans were allowed later in the season.
“Not exclusively, but whether there were fans there or not certainly was a factor,” Zaninovich said. “We want our games to look good when they’re on television and we want to give our schools an opportunity to maximize their commercial value and have fans attending their games on campus.”
The fan component joined a number of other factors Zaninovich said the conference juggled, including availability of teams, availability of arenas, television windows and doing it all at a time when every other conference was also canceling and rescheduling games.
“You have to kind of measure all these things and make your best guess,” Zaninovich said.
Despite not going on a COVID pause because of their own issues, the Wildcats had to hustle to make up their end of the bargain. The Pac-12 stuck the road UCLA makeup game at the end of a trip that started at Cal and Stanford; Arizona wound up losing 75-59 to the Bruins on Jan. 25.
But the Wildcats survived the other two make-up road games with ease. They won at ASU on a Monday (Feb. 7) before leaving on Feb. 9 for the Washington trip, when they swept WSU and Washington.
Arizona then made up the USC game by going home briefly after its Feb. 26 loss at Colorado, then crushing the Trojans 91-71 on March 1 to wrap up the Pac-12 regular-season championship.
By then, the league’s other 11 teams also were finishing up what became full 20-game schedules, something the Pac-12 women’s teams were not able to do.
There were some grumblings along the way of “gamesmanship,” coaches avoiding difficult matchups by saying they weren’t ready, but Zaninovich said any reports that teams couldn’t play were verified through independent medical staffers on campus.
Kliavkoff said doing so was “a process that allows me to come to the conclusion that this is not an issue in our league.”
Still, if nothing else, it was difficult.
Zaninovich said he remembered meeting with conference athletic directors in December, when nine teams had already been hit with COVID pauses.
“They said, ‘Hey, slow down. ... Let’s get some teams through these pauses. Here are some principles and let’s reschedule within these,’” Zaninovich said. “We got very fortunate that we were able to get all the games in with those principles.”
Zaninovich said the fact that Arizona never paused because of its own COVID-19 issues was a big key to making the rescheduling puzzle work.
Kliavkoff credited Zaninovich and his staff for their work with the schools, and also a little luck, to get it done somehow.
“I think fortune had something to do with it,” Kliavkoff said. “The fact that we got all of these games rescheduled for the men is, candidly, miraculous given some of the complications we were facing.”
