Are you ready for some football?
Get set, fall camp officially begins next week, that according to Oregon head coach Mario Cristobal who talked about the start of the 2020 campaign on ESPN Friday morning.
The primary catalyst to beginning the season was the addition of ‘rapid testing’ for the players, coaches and staff, and it appears that’ll be in place in the coming days.
“We have these machines coming in now that allow you to conduct daily testing which really mitigates a lot of the risk with the virus and the threat and what not,” Cristobal explained.
“Once those machines are up and running, we should be full throttle in terms of practice and preparation to be able to move forward and have our regular camp and our regular practices in preparation for a season.”
Within all of the craziness over the last two months, it appears there will finally be a semblance of a football season. According to the official release from the conference office, the Pac-12 is putting together a six game regular season schedule along with a seventh game which will be the conference championship game which is scheduled for Friday December 18th.
Like the Big-10, each of the conference teams who don’t make the conference championship, will also have a seventh game. In the conference discussion was matching North and South No. 2’s playing each other, No. 3’s matched up, and so on.
There’s still no word on how or if bowl games will be played, or how the College Football Playoff will be fairly structured.
As fall camp prepares to get underway, Cristobal discussed the workout perimeters that are in place for players before practice actually begins. The Ducks are able to spend 20 hours per week in their ramp up preparation – 8 hours of weekly strength & conditioning work, one hour each day of walk-through practice, and the remainder of time for position meetings and skill instruction.
“It really marries up well with the original plan,” said Cristobal. “We’re going with it. Guys feel good about it. We’ve been training. Guys have been training on their own. Guys in town train here. So we feel that we will be more than ready to play well come Nov. 7.”
Other coaches feel a bit more reluctant with that timeline including UCLA head coach Chip Kelly.
“Yeah, it’s pushing it” said Kelly on the Dan Patrick Show Friday morning when asked if six weeks is enough time to prepare.
“When I hear people say how did you pick six weeks,…because our players haven’t really been doing anything. If our players in a normal year are with our strength coach during all of June and all of July then you can have four weeks of camp and then you can go. They’ve had eight weeks to get ready for camp. There are some schools,…us, specifically the California schools that haven’t had the opportunity to do that so we think six weeks will prepare us for it.”
A complete 2020 schedule hasn’t been released by the Pac-12 as yet. Conference officials say it should be released by sometime next week.