When the pandemic began almost a year ago, the University of Washington had a big but bad team. Even a pair of eventual first-round NBA draft picks up front couldn’t prevent the Huskies from finishing last in the Pac-12 Conference.

So how did fourth-year coach Mike Hopkins fix this?

He didn’t.

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The final Pac-12 Conference standings for Larry Scott's tenure as commissioner will show more L's than W's. But let's give him credit for a championship exit. He's bailing in June, a year ahead of contract expiration, but also ahead of more grimness for big-time college sports.

Scott won't have to deal with the Power 5 conferences seceding sloppily from the NCAA to form their own minor-league pro football enterprise.

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Lots of intriguing developments lately suggest that there may be a way forward this fall for college football in the Pac-12 Conference. Then Louisiana State coach Ed Orgeron had to spoil it for all by doing something exactly opposite of everyone else in the industry.

He told the truth. What a knucklehead.

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For those with lives beyond sports, the first day of NFL training camp is an annual calendar benchmark. It tells us that another too-short summer is slowly being taken  away, and that the Seahawks soon would inhale much of Puget Sound's oxygen for the next five months.

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Years from now, after the pandemic has faded, the economy has wobbled to its feet and college sports are reduced to "Olympic" activities subsidized by the rent paid by professional minor league football and basketball teams to use campus facilities and mascots, Aug. 11, 2020 will be viewed as a watershed day.

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Jen Cohen is about as earnest, enthusiastic and successful an athletics director as there is in the ruthless world of big-time college sports. As a Tacoma kid, she grew up enthralled by University of Washington sports. Since her 2016 appointment to succeed Scott Woodward as athletics director, she's been in her dream job.

So as you can imagine, the last seven months for her have been an unyielding nightmare.

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While the czars, viziers and potentates of sports are putting their shoulders into pushing the coronavirus off the calendars, evidence grew on a busy Tuesday that the sucker is dug in.

Noteworthy was news that the California State University system announced that most in-person classes on all 23 of its campuses in the fall would be cancelled and instruction instead would be offered primarily online.

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In March, the University of Washington baseball team was in line at SeaTac Airport to check bags for a flight to Los Angeles. Junior pitcher Jack Enger milled about, joking with teammates while mentally preparing to pitch the next day.

It was opening weekend of Pac-12 Conference play. The Bellevue native was scheduled to take the mound for the first time on Friday night, the spot generally reserved for each staff’s ace. When asked if he was excited, he flatly responded, “It's just another start.”

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We all know by now that predicting a definitive course for a coronavirus pandemic is like forecasting what the Seahawks will do with their first-round draft choice: We can do all the mock drafts we want, but nobody knows anything.

One thing we're learning about the pandemic, at least from the aspect of U.S. political response, is that it looks like windshield safety glass after a freeway rock.

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So much for four in a row. The Huskies couldn't get one. Now they're done.

Four days after beating the Wildcats in Tucson, Washington was a horrendous 3-for-23 beyond the arc and crashed out of the Pac-12 Conference men's basketball tourney in Las Vegas Wednesday afternoon with a 77-70 loss to Arizona. The defeat almost certainly ends their season, unless the NIT field is even worse off than the basketball world already knows.

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The Washington Huskies men's basketball team is last in the Pac-12 Conference for a good reason:

There isn't a 13th place.

The final home game of the regular season Friday night at Hec Ed hit the high point pre-game, saying good-bye to Sam Timmins and the other seniors. The temptation was strong to end things there. But Washington State did come all the way from Pullman. Wouldn't have looked looked good to call it off.

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If Huskies fans thought an entire week of practice might help Washington pull out of one of more gruesome spirals in the history of UW men's hoops, they were wrong. They also were wrong if they believed Washington State (14-10, 5-6), even on its home court in Pullman, was mediocre enough to be vulnerable.

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Late in the first half Tuesday night, Seattle University's 6-7 senior guard, Mattia Da Campo from Venice, Italy, had the ball 80 feet from the Huskies hoop. He started pounding his left-handed dribble and bore down directly upon the basket. Quade Green sort of moved in his general direction, which was better than anyone else on Washington's defense.

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Down to the final minute they went, Gonzaga and Washington trading big plays and clutch shots. They had the crowd roaring, standing, jumping and calling for more. On Sunday night, a percolating Alaska Airlines Arena was the place to be, not in front of a TV set somewhere watching the Seahawks get manhandled.

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During a practice this month, the University of Washington Huskies men's hoopsters momentarily set up in their trademark 2-3 zone defense with 7-1 Brian Penn-Johnson,  6-9 Isaiah Stewart and 6-9 Hameir Wright in the back, and 6-6 Nahziah Carter and 6-6 Jamal Bey out front.

Most NBA teams can't do vertical like that.

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As the waterfall of oohs and aahs washes over the latest Huskies football hero, QB Jacob Eason, it is important to note, before his legend swells beyond recognition, that the most impressive pass he threw fell incomplete.

In Saturday's 47-14 walk-over (box) of Eastern Washington at Husky Stadium  -- the Big Sky Conference foe that University of Washington coach Chris Petersen tried in vain to hype into Notre Dame -- Eason in the second quarter had to corral a bad snap in shotgun formation. At the UW 35-yard line, he stepped to his right for a clear view of WR Aaron Fuller streaking down the sideline, beating single coverage.

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It wasn't possible to determine whether Chris Petersen was wearing burlap underwear. Just seemed like it.

"Timing is a little bit awkward," he said quietly. "I think that was a bit surprising."

Actually, it was the Huskies football coach who seemed awkward Monday, answering questions for the second time in four months about a quarterback wanting to leave his high-profile program to get more playing time elsewhere.

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In its ongoing pursuit to remain a relic from 19th-century Britain in 21st-century America, the NCAA has fired a shot across the bow of California state legislature that is advancing a bill to compensate college athletes by 2023 for use of their likenesses.

Mark Emmert, the former University of Washington president now in charge of rolling the NCAA's rock up a steep hill, wrote a letter of complaint last week strongly suggesting that if the bill became law, California schools would be prohibited from participating in NCAA events, including and especially four members of the Pac-12 Conference -- USC, UCLA, Cal-Berkeley and Stanford.

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Of all the nuisance things that have attended the Pac-12 Conference's full sellout of its breadwinner football enterprise to the demons of the television schedule, the 7:30 p.m. kickoff is the worst. And not just because it inconveniences me or my media colleagues, who manage to handle 7 p.m. starts for baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer games with only modest whimpering.

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It was over in warmups.

Watching North Carolina at one end of the arena in Columbus, and Washington at the other. After five minutes, any discerning follower of basketball could tell. There was almost no way to imagine that the Huskies were going to win their second-round game that Sunday afternoon in the NCAA men's basketball tourney.

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