Cal Football to play Arizona (maybe), Washington–USC for the championship, and other Week 7 contests
If Cal can field enough players, then we'd face a winless and interimly-head-coached Arizona.
The Pac-12 announced their North–South contests for Week 7 (pending any COVID cancellations), including the Pac-12 Championship game.
Washington loopholed their way into the Pac-12 Championship against USC, which makes sense for that school. Stanfurd will get to continue their in-state rivalry against UC Los Angeles and Oregon will play Colorado… at USC? The games were seemingly all set up to seed North and South teams by how well they finished in division, but switched up the games for fourth- and fifth-place finishers (Wazzu–Utah and ASU–OSU) to prevent a repeat of OSU–Utah. This sets up a week of unique games—none of these are rematches of 2020 games.
As the sixth-place team in the Pac-12 North, the Golden Bears are set to face the Arizona Wildcats—with the word “set” used as tenuously as possible. We are the only game listed as “to be determined” with no TV information, time, or day. This is potentially because of the positive COVID test among the team on Saturday the 12th, reports that the Bears may be down to two defensive linemen, and the logistics of getting the team up to Pac-12 minimum requirements in time.
Arizona is currently in disarray. The Wildcats are 0–5 on the season and have lost 12 consecutive games dating back to October 5, 2019. They fired head coach Kevin Sumlin on December 12 and will be led by interim head coach Paul Rhoads, who has a 32–55 record as head coach from his time at Iowa State from 2009–2015. By our recollection, California last played a team with a interim head coach in 2017—actually, twice that year—when we beat Cory Hall’s Oregon State on November 4 and lost to Jedd Fisch’s UC L.A. on November 24. If Arizona loses this game (or if it gets cancelled) then they will be the first Pac-12 team to go through the conference schedule without a win since that same 2017 Oregon State and the first Pac-12 team to end the entire season winless since 2008 Washington.
Cal is favored by 12 points against Arizona in early lines.
This looks like they're setting up the Pac-12 North to be slaughtered, which I guess is a result of the small sample size of games not really representing team strength. In normal times, I think UW would beat SC, but no team has even done well this year after returning from Covid-19 cases. Oregon should also beat Colorado, but I expect that will be close. Stanford I can't believe is 3-2... I wouldn't place faith in either Stanford or UCLA. Utah is far better than their record suggests, and I imagine they'll easily handle Wazzu. OSU and ASU is an interesting matchup, but ASU is also better than their 1-2 record indicates, and I think they'll probably win too. Cal is also far better than their record suggests, and would normally blow Arizona out of the water, so long as we even have players. And again, no team looks good recovering from covid-19. I'd give the edge to the South in almost all of those matchups.
Also, Arizona is so bad that it's not even an interesting matchup. Cal would have at least had a competitive game against #4 or #5, Utah or ASU. Shame we couldn't get that last game in to find out. I think we would have handled Wazzu.
In a season without as many cancellations, I'd expect something like UW/Oregon vs USC/Utah at the top, Cal vs Colorado, Stanford vs ASU, OSU vs UCLA, and Wazzu vs Arizona. I think these would be much more interesting games.
Well, it took less than 12 hours to cancel the Arizona-Cal game.