The notable comments and answers from the Pac-12's news conference

After announcing that it has postponed all sports until at least Jan. 1, Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott and the conference's CEO group held a virtual news conference with reporters.

Here were the key comments from the group, which included:

-Larry Scott

-Michael Schill, University of Oregon president and chair of the Pac-12 CEO Group

-Ray Anderson, Arizona State athletic director

-Dr. Doug Aukerman, Oregon State senior associate AD/sports medicine

"The student-athletes that will be impacted by this, I want to be clear, are going to have their scholarships guaranteed. We're going to strongly encourage the NCAA to support that with some of their upcoming decisions as well when it comes to eligibility, time to complete degrees and other related academic issues."

"As Larry said, our No. 1 concern is the health and safety of our student-athletes and we have been talking ever since this nightmare began in the late winter or early spring about what we would do and how we would approach this in regard to intercollegiate athletics. What we ended up talking about in a really good and collegial way, inclusive way -- we met with students, we met with our ADs constantly, our coaches, with the medical advisory board, we listened to all of the views and we determined that there's just too many questions, there's too much uncertainty right now that we would feel comfortable beginning contact sports. So what we decided was that essentially what we do is put a pause basically until 2021 and we'll constantly be reassessing the data. One of the things that's really important is we are science-based, we are academics, we are going to be looking at facts and not just opinions, and that's something that we're deeply committed to. At the same time, we fully understand that this has tremendous human impacts. We have students who's dream it was to play this year, and that dream at least in the fall is not going to happen. We have families, we have coaches, we have all sorts of people who are hoping that we'd be able to do this. That's one of the reasons why we delayed our decision until now, because we wanted to really give it the best shot. But in the end we looked at the recent cardiac evidence, we looked at spread which was increasing in some of our areas, we looked at government directives and we just said there's too many questions, too much uncertainty. So we'll continue to assess and hopefully we'll be playing in the spring."

"We've had 24 really dedicated physicians and infectious disease experts and more recently some additional sports cardiology experts join our crew, and we meet at least two hours a week and talk. We've been doing that continuously for some time. As we moved closer to the date where we were to begin contact practice, we were really concerned with a couple items. One was that coronavirus is still very prevalent in many of our institutional communities, and by metrics that are out there is not considered to be well-controlled, or uncontrolled, at this time. The other issue is that there's some emerging data about some health risks that affect athletes and specifically cardiac side effects of potential COVID infections that we don't know enough about. So we became more concerned about that. That's kind of how we began to start looking at how can we provide the safest opportunity, the safety environment for our student-athletes to compete when social distancing can no longer be maintained. We were essentially by going into a contact season right now asking them to disregard a lot of the guidelines both federally and locally from the health department and the CDC to socially distance and physically distance to decrease the spread of this disease. Instead, playing contact sports we know is a condition where there's going to be higher risk of spread."

"It's not an option because our responsibilities are not about liability -- our responsibilities are about accountability to these student-athletes and their families short and long-term. So we can't waive our duties and obligations to protect them driven by the science and the medicine. We're not driven by lawyers who say, well, we'll relieve you of liability. That's not what floats the boat in this conference. We have responsibility to accountability, so the science and medicine says we cannot allow you to go forward right now so we won't. I hear there's talk about 'We'll sign a waiver, we want to play so badly.' Coaches talking about 'We've got to play.' Well, we don't have to play until it's safe and we can literally guarantee the health and safety of our student-athletes, not just know but their lives going forward because we don't know the impacts going forward. And until we have more clarity, we're not going to go forward. That's where we are. So the liability thing, other folks can talk about that. We're about accountability and responsibility to our student-athletes."

"Well, we know the situation is going to improve. We're optimistic. When and how and when the conditions are right that everyone feels comfortable moving to contact practice and then thinking about a season starting are really all question marks at the moment. Like we done every step along the way, we're going to continue to monitor, we're going to continue to evaluate and when the conditions improve -- which we're confident they will -- then we're going to evaluate what we can do in terms of all sports, not just football. But it's clear, based on the medical advice, recommended we don't start with contact practice, our ADs, football coaches, others came together and felt we're not going to be able to start football and our fall Olympic sports on time as planned, which we already delayed to Sept. 26, and it's important to give clarity to student-athletes. This has been a time of great uncertainty and great anxiety for everyone, so we also feel a responsibility based on all the trends that we've seen to try and give some of that certainty and clarity. So that's why we said 'not before January 1' so people can plan emotionally, psychologically as well as physically. And we've got a lot of work to do, and we don't have every question answered right now. So we're going to dig back in ... to continue our scenario planning. ... What that looks like, we've got more work to do, but know that as soon as we feel comfortable and that it's safe, some of these questions are answered that we feel more comfortable, we're going to want to play."

"Each of the Power 5 conference medical groups did interact once a week for the last couple months on a working group, so there has been some discussion about the issues and concerns. But I can't speak to how they're going to deliberate and come to their final conclusion or thought processes. What I can say is our infectious disease, public health doctors and cardiologists and consultants, as well as our physicians have really taken a lot of time and effort in this thought process. They all would love to see sports as much as anyone else, but we want to see it done in a very safe manner. It just became really evident to us as we looked at the prevalence of coronavirus in our communities in the Pac-12, as we looked at traveling and the logistics of some of our sports traveling commercially, and as we looked at making sure that we could stop the spread of coronavirus if either a staff member or athlete got it, once we started becoming more concerned about some of the side effects and some of the other health outcomes that we don't know what the short and long-term consequences are yet, we felt we have to shift to a mindset of not just trying to stop spread but we need to be able to identify and remove anybody that has coronavirus right away.

"And that becomes incredibly difficult when you're in a community where the spread is not controlled or it's not under some type of availability to mitigate it. Because our student-athletes are students and they're going to go to the grocery store, they're going to go to restaurants, they're going to interact with the community and we want them to. It's not appropriate to think that we can bubble them and isolate them. Therefore we felt that it was just very, very difficult to try to do this in a way that we felt was safe enough for our student-athletes that we would support."

"We wanted it to be unanimous and it was unanimous. There was no big drama, there were no fights, there were no disagreements. Probably the biggest disagreement that we had was over the wording of the press release -- should a 'the' be an 'a' or something like that. We're all in this together. We're on the field we're going to compete as hard as we can with each other, but when we're back in our offices thinking about what we care about the most we're together."

"We don't know if they're going to play or not. What we believe is we made the decision that is in the best interest of our student-athletes and their experience. I think our coaches are very confident, our medical folks are very confident, I think all of us are confident that we made a decision with our presidents and chancellors in the best interest of our student-athletes, and that will be appreciated because we will play again. And to the extent that others think there's an opportunity to essentially come recruit our players, then we would say, 'Hey, have at it.' We're not going to change what's important to us, which is protect our student athletes, or worry about whether others are going to come and entice our student-athletes away. We think our student-athletes are going to appreciate that we have done what is in their best interests short and long-term and we're going to continue to do that."

"We are strongly encouraging the NCAA to make decisions as quickly as possible to extend eligibility for student-athletes. We saw it happen in the spring and we're going to put our shoulder completely behind supporting our student-athletes if they don't get to play a season to get another year back."

"To clarify, competition wouldn't be restarted until Jan. 1. In terms of sports and continuing to support student-athletes in terms of their training, their workouts, every school will decide exactly what that means, but sports I expect is going to continue and support is going to continue. And subject to medical guidance, when we can, it may ratchet up even to training with contact at some stage if the conditions warrant it. But what we said today is competition in all sports wouldn't start before Jan. 1, and that's any sport including fall sports and winter sports like basketball."

"A lot. As Ray knows because he and his fellow ADs sit on these working groups and discuss a lot of different scenarios, we have eight-game scenarios starting mid-October and late October. So those were available to us, but as we looked at where our counties are, where the permissions are and projections and trends frankly from our medical advisory team, we came to the conclusion reluctantly that there's no indication that things are likely to change in terms of the criteria that influenced this in the next few weeks. And we had to balance that out with the kind of clarity and certainty that our coaches and student-athletes want, so that was a reluctant decision because for months and months we've been taking a very measured step-by-step approach letting science and data and public health authority guidelines guide us. So that would have been the logical next step, but we realize the trade-off there is this uncertainty student-athletes, coaches and others have about 'Are we on? Are we off?' That weighed heavily too."

"Certainly as we review the infection rates and the kinetics of this virus in each of our communities, we are monitoring several different modelings that are out there through government and other university resources. You put them all together, the prevailing expectation is we will be dealing with coronavirus for some time and this is not going to rapidly fall off the curve without some extreme changes in our society and our social behavior. So looking at those, we do think there is going to be improvement and certainly hopefully it will continue to improve, but it's not going to disappear."

"We've got to go back and work with our working group. We've got a basketball planning, working group working on different scenarios, and some of it will also depend on what the NCAA decides in terms of March Madness and the envelope for the season. We'll obviously stay in close contact with the NCAA in terms of their plans for postseason, and it's just one of the many things we now have to get to work on."

"We had a conversation with them last Monday, with the group -- I think every Pac-12 team was represented. We thought it was productive, we were listening to their concerns, so we will have follow-up conversations with them as appropriate as this whole situation evolves. But there's been a ton of things we've been dealing with and talking about, and we'll circle back to that for sure."

"From my perspective, every institution is going to have to determine for itself what the way forward is. We're certainly intending and adamant about continuing the experiences for all of our student-athletes, and so finances no question will have an impact, but it's a matter of how you make the appropriate adjustments on both the expense side and revenue creation side and we're going to be working hard to try to figure that out. Our view is that we're going to get better -- the pandemic is a temporary thing; quality athletics in the Pac-12 is a forever thing as far as we're concerned. So we'll deal like any business has to, like any organization -- when you have short-term challenges you figure a way to deal with them. Some of them are financial, you figure it out and you move forward. That's what we intend to do."

"There's a lot more work that needs to be done from our working group, I'd acknowledge that. But we're going to exhaust every possibility to leave open that opportunity for our student-athletes and our programs. We know how important it is for our student-athletes to be able to play, to do so as safely as possible if it's possible. But not just for the Pac-12 examine it, part of it is going to have something to do with peer leagues, when the dust settles we see who else is looking at the possibility of a spring we'll look at that as well. So there's a collaborative aspect to this as well as what the Pac-12 wants to do, and yes it's uncharted territory, there's no question, and it's going to result in a significant strain of resources on our campuses if we wind up taking winter and spring sports and are looking at fall sports on top, but we've got a lot of really expert leaders on our campuses that will spend a significant amount of time on it. We'll work through all the details to preserve that possibility."

"Actually, as difficult as this situation is, I think we all are really proud of the cohesiveness, the collaboration, the togetherness and the spirit -- everyone is in this together. Thanks to great leadership on our campuses, we have very strong culture and there was really never any serious discussion about not working together in lock step."

"No, not even close. Everybody was very enthusiastic about agreeing with each other and very committed to agreeing with each other about this. We're proud to be in the Pac-12. We think this is the greatest conference and we're going to stick together with this decision. The decision was unanimous -- that's not unanimous meaning that people were against it and then just joined in because they wanted to be good soldiers. It was unanimous because we all recognized this was the morally correct thing to do, and we did it."

"Certainly from an athletics perspective, there was never any talk of anybody peeling off and doing their own thing. It's been collaborative together from day one."

"Certainly we'll have more time to follow people who are in this age population who get this illness and determine who has had short-term complications from it and get a better sense of what the prevalence of that is -- is it 1 percent, is it 5 percent, is it 20 percent? This virus is not going to change how it attacks the receptors in the lung tissue or in myocardial. What hopefully will change is the prevalence and how much the virus is out there. Also, how easy are we able to test for it, new testing technologies hopefully will become available to where we can do even more testing and more rapid testing and not create a burden on our health resources. But clearly a decrease in the prevalence of COVID in our environments can definitely happen between now and then as long as everybody in our communities work on it."

"That is one of the top questions and considerations -- how many football games could be played in one calendar year. We obviously have a spring portion of the football season, but nothing like playing a full season. So whether it's a full season, compressed season, there's a lot of different scenarios that folks are looking at. So you have identified one of the reasons why considering the spring was not at the top of the list of things we wanted to default to right away. There are going to be some health and safety considerations vis-a-vis that we've got a fall football season and the number of games we play. We are reluctantly coming to this decision that the earliest that we could start would be in January with a lot of details to figure out, including the point you made, a very good point, and it weighs heavily on our coaches, our athletic directors, our medical personnel as they think about post-January."

"Everyone's going to make their independent decisions and we certainly respect our colleagues. We try to be very collaborative, communicative with our peers across the country. At the end of the day, our presidents and chancellors are looking at what was in the best interests of Pac-12 student-athletes based on the advice and frankly what's going on in our communities. So let me just say, this is uncharted territory, this is a very unique year. It will get better, we'll get back to some semblance of normalcy, but people are just trying to figure out the best they can with student-athlete welfare in mind and that may lead to differences and we accept that."