Washington got their 11/27 game cancelled. The PAC12 schedules this year leave no margin of error. What to do? There is a strong possibility that they might play Utah if ASU has to cancel, But what if ASU pulls a rabbit out of their hat and fields a team next Sunday? If that happened it would leave Washington with nobody to play. They need to make contingency plans.
The PAC12 has just relaxed the rule about OOC games, so Washington starts looking around. They see BYU, a quality opponent, has the weekend free. BYU is close, they doing their own looking around for quality opponents, and they are on excellent scheduling terms with the PAC12. Why not approach them and ask them if they would be willing to fill in if Utah ends up playing ASU? So they call BYU to discus it.
Prepping games between big time football teams is a teensy-weensy bit more complicated than getting ready for a game of pickup ball. A lot of time and money goes into prepping for them, money that is spent before the game is even played, and that's just in a normal year. In this year, the PAC12 has decried that their teams and any teams playing them must follow one of the strictest (and most expense) Covid-19 protocols of all college sports. If the game gets canceled, all that prep money was spent for nothing, and if there is no compensation for the cancelation, it was totally wasted, gone.
Money is very tight right now. There simply isn't that much money laying around that can easily be thrown at a game which both parties know has a very strong possibility of not even being played. Add on the stringent, draconian rules the PAC12 has attached to such games, and the decision to agree to them must be carefully weighed and balanced before accepting.
Not surprisingly BYU declined to immediately schedule a game under the conditions the PAC12 dictates. If UW could guarantee a game, okay. Otherwise, BYU wants to protect their interests. They want to wait until the CFP ranking come out, and then they can see if it makes sense to agree to the PAC12 conditions. And who knows? It might be possible that UW and other teams in the same boat could convince the PAC12 to relent on their no-play-no-pay rule.
So far, so good. We see UW and BYU acting like mature, responsible adults negotiating a deal complicated by a mixed-up, topsy-turvy year.
Then some idiot — we may never know whom — decides to leak a juicy piece of gossip and adds a little bit of spicy spin to it as gossip tends to be. And Twitter is off to the races.