Longtime college football writer Matt Hayes has been talking to a lot of coaches and ADs, and he thinks the sport’s power brokers will find a way to hold some kind of season. “It may be truncated and may start later, but many firmly believe there will be ball,” he said.
The more coaches/ADs I talk to, the more I think the #CFB season is happening. It may be truncated and may start later, but many firmly believe there will be ball.
— Matt Hayes (@MattHayesCFB) April 2, 2020
I expect conference commissioners and athletic directors to try to find any possible way to make football happen. It’s the sport that pays for all the others. Men’s basketball is modestly profitable in some places, and certain sports at certain schools like LSU baseball or UConn women’s basketball come out in the black. Mostly though, football makes everything else possible. At some G5 and FCS programs, payouts from guarantee games against P5 teams account for a substantial portion of the revenue.
It’s worth noting for a moment that ADs and coaches are not experts in epidemiology. Their predictions about the status of SARS-CoV-2 five months from now are not worth all that much. The statement from Hayes is about the strength of their collective intentions, not a reflection of a superior level of information about the virus.
Supposing those in charge will make any kind of football season happen that they possibly can, here are some of the main considerations they’ll have to deal with.
When is the deadline to start?
If the season must start later, how much later are they willing to go? An example I’ve seen thrown out there a few times is mid-October. A normal regular season would go from about then to the middle of January. Seeing as how the LSU-Clemson game happened on January 13, college football has already gone to mid-January. There’d be more teams in this scenario, obviously, but the sport has gone on that long already.
A season wrapping up in January would be one thing. One starting in January? That’d be a different story. Would there be enough down time between it ending and the fall 2021 season? Would draft eligible players participate?
How much of a season?
Doing a full 13-week regular season beginning on Saturday, October 17 would put rivalry games on Saturday, January 9. Conference championships would then happen January 16.
Is that feasible? It could be. There is the issue of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays being in there, though. It’s one thing if a handful of teams have bowl games around those dates. Trying to play a full slate of games between Christmas Eve on Thursday and December 26th on Saturday this year might be more difficult.
However if the start of the season has to slip further than mid-October, there may be a need to cut the season down. It’s hard to imagine anything less than a full conference slate. There would have to be some scheduling negotiations around the issue of different conferences having different numbers of conference games, and the ACC specifically would have to decide how binding its five games a year with Notre Dame are. All of the independents would be in a bind in a season of conference games only.
If things do go down to just conference slates, that’s a lot of non-conference games that won’t happen. One-time cancelations of annual series like Florida-FSU and Kentucky-Louisville are likely to be amicable. Those G5 and FCS teams counting on guarantee games I mentioned prior won’t be so willing to walk away from contests with nothing.
How will they ensure player safety?
The reason sports were canceled last month was not about fans getting sick. It was about players getting sick.
Right now, there isn’t testing capacity to proactively test every one of the thousands of college football players every week to see if they have COVID-19. I sincerely hope such capacity will be in place a few months from now. It will take something like that to establish the trust needed to allow the games to happen.
Coaches, support staff, referees, photographers, and anyone else who will appear on the sideline will have to undergo this same kind of rigorous testing. It’ll take coordination at the conference level to make sure nothing is slipping through the cracks.
Will there be fans?
The AD at Pitt doesn’t think a season without fans is viable. I’m the exact opposite right now: I can’t see how a season with fans could be viable, at least before a vaccine is widely available sometime in 2021.
A February soccer match in northern Italy was a major event in the spread of the virus. It is simply unsafe to pack fans into the close proximity of a stadium if some of them have COVID-19.
Could a school deal with the liability of encouraging tens of thousands of people to congregate together? Keep in mind also that most stadiums are on college campuses. University presidents have a responsibility to keep their students safe. I don’t know how inviting that many random members of the general public to campus will be consistent with that part of the mission.
There likely will be virus flareups around the country until the vaccine arrives, and they will be unpredictable given the lag between infection and symptoms showing. People who truly believe they don’t have it may actually be a carrier, and you really don’t want them in your on-campus stadium.
I realize that ticket sales, the “donations” (i.e. seat licenses) that go with them, and luxury boxes are key elements to the revenue that schools are looking to preserve. There is a lot of uncertainty and risk to having fans at games pre-vaccine, though, and the decisions about them will come from above the pay grade of athletic directors.
Will it count for anything?
Whatever semblance of a season happens is probably going to get disrupted due to those flareups I just mentioned. If Gainesville or Starkville or Athens or Tuscaloosa become home to the virus again, the teams from those places are probably done playing for four weeks or more. They’ll have to go back to the social distancing that’s so common now, and certainly other teams won’t want to play road games in those places.
Traditional record keeping schemes don’t really have a good way of dealing with disruptions like that. Whatever this 2020 season might end up being, it could easily end up an exhibition season with no official titles being handed out.