The Big Ten is back — what about the Pac-12?

The Big Ten has announced the return of their fall season. They’ll kick off in mid-October and finish up with their Big Ten Championship game just ahead of the final College Football Playoff rankings.

If you thought you were escaping an Ohio State Buckeyes team in the playoffs this year — well, you thought wrong.

Now that the Big Ten has announced their return, everyone is looking at the Pac-12 and what they’ll do. And if they’ll decide to ultimately follow suit with the Big Ten, like they did when it came time to announce their decisions to suspend the 2020 fall season.

It looks extremely unlikely at this point that the Pac-12 will follow the Big Ten in their return to the field in 2020.

According to a statement from Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, the Pac-12 has major local health guidelines to contend with, more so than the Big Ten states had.

“At this time, our universities in California and Oregon do not have approval from state or local public health officials to start contact practice. We are hopeful that our new daily testing capability can help satisfy public health official approvals in California and Oregon to begin contact practice and competition. We are equally closely monitoring the devastating fires and air quality in our region at this time. We are eager for our student-athletes to have the opportunity to play this season, as soon as it can be done safely and in accordance with public health authority approvals.”

So, until that happens, it seems ever-so unlikely for the Pac-12 to return to action this fall. Especially since the Big Ten has announced, and the Big Ten schools are all in agreement as well as have already begun or continued to practice as teams this fall for their allotted 20 hours a week.

We’ll see how it all unfolds, but at this rate, we’ve all got to be hopeful for a 2021 fall/spring season to actually come to fruition.

As this story develops, we’ll update more.