HCA: Pac-12 reveals plans for cancelled games and tiebreakers

With the 2020 Pac-12 season set to kick off in just under three weeks on November 7th, the conference announced their plans for both cancellations of games as well as what would happen in the event of a tie.

Lets start with cancellations; in order for a team to play they must have 53 available scholarship players including seven offensive lineman, one quarterback, and four defensive lineman. Each school will be required to present a complete roster before the season detailing positions for each player. If the school is unable to meet those roster requirements, the school has the option to continue playing if they choose to. If the school is unable to meet those numbers and decides not to play then the game will be either rescheduled or declared a no-contest at the discretion of the Commissioner.

On top of the roster requirements, the conference announced five other COVID-19 related requirements to play. The game will be rescheduled or declared a no contest if the school is: unable to isolate new positive cases within the team or athletic department, not able to perform testing guidelines set forth by the Pac-12 medical team, transmission rates within the community or campus that are considered unsafe by local public health officials, the inability to perform contract tracing that is consistent with the governmental requirements, and/or the public health officials declare that there is an inability to accommodate a surge in COVID-19 cases in local hospitals.

When it comes to tiebreakers at the end of the season, the conference announced multiple different procedures for all of the possibilities. In order to be considered for a divisional tiebreaker a team “must play no less than one fewer conference game than the average number of conference games played by all conference teams.” The average number of games played will be rounded up or down at .50 meaning that if the average number of games played in 5.25 it would be rounded down to 5 - a team would need to play four games in order to be considered for the tiebreaker.

Each division winner will be determined by the best winning percentage within the conference. Winning percentage will take a back seat to head-to-head results in the instance that there is a tiebreaker.

There are eight procedures to determine the Pac-12 Championship game representative in result of a two team tie:

1. Head-to-head results
2. Record in games played within the division
3. Record against the next highest placed team in the division
4. Record in common conference games
5. Team with the highest CFP ranking
6. Cumulative winning percentage of each opponent
7. Highest ranking by SportSource Analytics following the completion of the last regular season game
8. Coin Toss

The tie breaker goes on to talk about multiple team ties as well as determining the conference Championship participants if there are four or less games played. To read the full rules on ties and cancellations or postponements, click here.

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