Rose Bowl News Yesterday from the Oregonian...

Nov 13, 2020, 6:14 AM

EUGENE — The Rose Bowl Game, site of one of the College Football Playoff semifinals, is open to moving back the date of its game if circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on college football make Jan. 1, 2021 untenable.

David Eads, CEO and Executive Director of the Tournament of Roses, told The Oregonian/OregonLive he and his staff are preparing for the game to be held as scheduled on its traditional Jan. 1 at 2 p.m. PT but that “flexibility and patience" have been the group’s ethos amid the pandemic.

“Right now we are still planning for January 1st CFP semifinal game at the Rose Bowl, but also you can’t avoid the headlines of what’s happening right now with the spread of the virus and its impact on college football,” Eads said Thursday afternoon. “I think similar to what you’ve heard from others, flexibility is going to have to be key.”

The Rose Bowl is synonymous with Jan. 1, but the game has been played 16 times on Jan. 2-4, the latest being in 2006 when it was the BCS National Championship Game. It’s scheduled for Jan. 2 after the 2022 season.

Eads doesn’t view the game as immovable from Jan. 1, particularly this year.

“We haven’t been asked to adjust up to this point,” he said. “If we’re not able to host a game on January 1st because of an outbreak of the virus and cancellation of games and those type of things and our date will have to change, we have to be flexible to that. We have to be flexible in our planning and we are being flexible in our planning in looking at all different contingencies. While we’re planning on January 1st and our hope is January 1st, we also have to be realistic.”

A decision to move back the CFP wouldn’t be made by Eads or anyone else involved with the Rose Bowl Game, but rather the CFP management committee of 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick.

On Tuesday, CFP executive director Bill Hancock told The Oregonian/OregonLive there had not been any discussions of pushing back the dates of the playoff games.

But earlier Thursday, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby became the first member of the management committee to publicly acknowledge they’ve discussed delaying this year’s CFP.

“We’ve spent some time talking about that; we haven’t come to any closure on it, but there is some latitude to postpone if that need should arise,” Bowlsby said on SiriusXM. “The same is true with some of those New Year’s Six games. Within reason, you can do those things. I don’t know that I see us playing a (national) championship game in February but you just never know. These are unusual times and things that might otherwise might not be acceptable have to be considered in this kind of circumstance.”

Pushing back the CFP has become a topic of increased speculation and interest as the number of games postponed and canceled has increased in recent weeks.

The SEC has four games postponed this week and just three being played. The Pac-12 had two games canceled last week, the conference’s opening weekend. Ohio State’s game at Maryland is canceled this week. Wisconsin has seen multiple games canceled.

Yet the FBS conferences are maintaining a trajectory to holding their conference championships on Dec. 18-19 in order to complete the regular season for selection Sunday on Dec. 20, bowls starting the in the week thereafter and the New Year’s Six on as scheduled.

“We have finish lines right now,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “So my focus is on December 19th for an SEC Championship game. I’ve said that. The semifinals are on the 1st. The (CFP national) championship on the 11th. The reality is if you walk in the back of my building, there’s a sign that says be flexible. When you walk in, it’s a reminder to everyone who walks in this building with their masks on as they put on their KINEXON device to maintain distance to your earlier question that we’ll all have to be flexible.

"I’m not going to hypothesize about change, but I’m not inattentive to the potential that change may need to occur at a number of different levels.”

ESPN is another major actor in this conversation as it televises the CFP, New Year’s Six and many other bowls, some of which it operates through ESPN Events. The network is still aiming for a “robust bowl season” and “normal” College Football Playoff, ESPN vice president of programming Nick Dawson said in a release issued Thursday.

“In a world of chaos where nothing is normal, our hope is everything (save the number of fans in the stands) will be normal for the CFP,” Dawson said. “The top four teams as decided by the selection committee playing in two semifinals at the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day with the winners advancing to the National Championship game in Miami on Monday, Jan. 11. When toe hopefully meets leather at 5:10 p.m. ET on Jan. 1 in Pasadena and when that sunset paints the San Gabriel Mountains in their signature golden hue near the end of the third quarter, I hope fans across the country can find a moment of normalcy and comfort in knowing 2020 is no more and a new year has arrived. With that comes hope, optimism and the best college football has to offer.”

The Pac-12 has a six-game season and conference title game. The SEC has 10, the ACC has 10 plus one nonconference, the Big 12 has nine games plus one nonconference and the Big Ten has eight, all with conference championship games to follow.

But those schedules have all been impacted by postponements and cancellations. The SEC now has to weigh whether to reschedule Alabama’s game at LSU, which already had its game with Florida postponed to Dec. 12. With Alabama and Florida currently leading the SEC West and East divisions, Dec. 19 is not a viable option for those teams to play rescheduled games.

And that’s as of now, with the possibility of further game postponements in the coming weeks still looming.

Sankey said adjustments to the SEC’s schedule will impact more than just the games directly impacted, as was the case previously. But the time remaining to make schedule adjustments is constrained by playing conference title games on Dec. 18-19, which is due to the scheduled bowls and CFP to follow.

If the CFP semifinals were moved back, even to Jan. 4, it would seemingly buy all FBS conferences another week to makeup postponed and canceled games or in the case of some Pac-12 teams, add a game if need be, while keeping the national championship on Jan. 11. Additionally, if the conference championships games were moved back to Dec. 26 the conferences that play neutral-site games at NFL stadiums would appear to still be able to do so since the NFL doesn’t have any games scheduled that day.

“In my conversations about naming a champion on the 19th, I’ve not thought about the Rose Bowl or Sugar Bowl or January 1, per se, as a priority,” Sankey said. “I’ve got to focus on trying to complete a season. At some point we have to have a finish line. So I don’t know that constraints necessarily are artificial. We’re just trying to act as responsibly as possible given the circumstances in front of us.”

Eads wasn’t sure when a decision might be made about whether to push back the CFP, but felt conference title games or the determining of conference champions being impacted would be a significant factor if that happens.

“Once they get to that point and a conference hasn’t been able to complete a championship or there are still games that need to be played I think that’s probably going to be a time frame of where we really have a clear picture of what New Year’s Day is going to look like,” Eads said. “We’re planning for New Year’s Day. If that has to slide three of four days or that has to slide five or six days or whatever the flexibility that’s going to be required, we’re prepared for that. We don’t need a month preparation to say here’s going to be a new date for the Rose Bowl Game. ... You could design 100 scenarios of all the ifs and whens. I don’t want to commit to what we’re exactly what we’re going to do.

“If a date of a semifinal has to change due to impacts of COVID we’re going to be flexible to meeting whatever that revised schedule is and that’s not going to be our decision, that’s going to be others' decision. But right now we’re hoping for January 1st. We know America wants January 1st. Everybody wants to wake up and start a new year and have some sense of normalcy, that is so important to people right now. Part of that tradition is the Rose Bowl Game at 2 p.m. on January 1st live from Pasadena and that’s our hope.”

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