Explain this to me about Ucks scheduling a non conference game this weekend

I thought you had to play if you have enough players to field a team.  They had one positive.

Because contact tracing when the team is on the road can take the entire team out for a week.   Also, the reason it's not as easy for ASU to just stick around is because U of O and Arizona play on Monday, so the Ducks would have the back to back. 

Pretty easy fix in order to get all conference games in. Have Arizona State play UO on Saturday and us on Monday. Arizona's schedule remains as set. The relatively minor inconvenience to us and Arizona State would seem to be more than offset by getting in a conference game.

Sounded like a good idea there bvrbooster until I noticed their Monday game is a ESPN televised game. I don’t think they would give that up for us switching

Oregon did not have a "shutdown" so there was no shutdown that was set to expire on any particular date.  A true shutdown would have likely lasted 2 full weeks, wiping out all of this weekend's games.

As wbosh15 pointed out, the positive test took place on the road last Friday 1/29 and at the time, Oregon said they would remain in Salt Lake City "indefinitely."  They then entered the contact tracing black box and somehow emerged unscathed except for the one player.  I don't know when they returned to Eugene, but they said today that they will return to full practice "later this week."  So the earliest they could start practicing would be Thursday and the Pac-12 has always granted cancellations in women's basketball if a team does not want to play within two days of the resumption of practice.

Oregon must have said we don't want to play on Friday but would be willing to play on Saturday, and Arizona State presumably said well we don't want to play back-to-back on Saturday and Sunday.  But I believe both teams are trying to re-schedule this game (I assume on Wednesday) because the postponement announcement said "The rescheduled date for this game will be announced when finalized."  That is not the language that is usually used in typical postponements which say we will work gosh-darned hard with the Pac-12 to reschedule this game (translation: it will never be played).

So in the meantime, Oregon plays UC Davis on Saturday.  It will be interesting to see the timing of ASU's decision on whether to play the Oregon game later in the week - might they wait until after the outcome of the game with the Beavs to decide whether it's in their interest to play in Eugene?  It's an interesting calculation.