With the Big Ten and Pac-12 choosing to go to conference play only, this year’s will not be a normal football season. Several FCS conferences have either postponed fall sports or canceled league play, the latter arrangement allowing their teams to play as independents for a year if they want to. Those decisions, more of which are likely to come, will cause some FBS teams to lose non-conference games (if they’re going to play them at all).
The Big Sky Conference has not made a public decision yet, but it’s hard to imagine its Eastern Washington football team hopping on a plane to make it for September 5th in the Swamp. The filters and quick air circulation in airplanes make them not as dangerous of a virus spreading environment as you might think, but that’s still a lot of people to put on a commercial flight unless UF is going to send a private jet. Plus there may not be a good way to ensure EWU players meet the standard of testing that a Power 5 opponent might.
Along those lines, the Power 5 are discussing among themselves creating a consistent policy. The draft that Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger got doesn’t sound conducive to a steady season.
Players have to be tested within 72 hours of a game. UF Health might be able to turn tests around that quickly, but will every school have that ability? Positive tests trigger at least 10-day quarantines. “High risk” contact with someone who tests positive will trigger a 14-day quarantine even with a negative test.
There is a definition for high risk contact, and it includes doing face-to-face drills. Lots of football drills are face-to-face by their nature, and they can involve multiple position groups. A team will probably want to modify its drills to keep the face-to-face contact to an absolute minimum to prevent one player’s positive test from sidelining dozens of teammates.
And, of course, there are criteria for community and societal factors to end a team’s season regardless of what’s happening with the players themselves. These can include out-of-control spread on campus or the local healthcare system coming under real stress.
If there is a season, still a big if, it’s hard to see how a team will get through it without periodically losing players to quarantines. If they can’t keep the athletes from getting the disease over the summer when they’re only doing workouts and campuses have smaller populations, it’s not going to happen in the fall either. Full-strength vs. full-strength will be a relative rarity.
So, whatever the 2020 season looks like, it’s going to have the “this was not a normal season” asterisk on it.
It’s most unfortunate for the seniors. It will be hard for all of them, but perhaps the most frustrating victim of circumstance is Kyle Trask. This was finally his chance to head into a season being the starting quarterback for the first time in high school or college. If the season happens at all, it’s not going to be one where he can compete the whole way with all his teammates going against opponents’ best.
There’s also the matter of what happens if the season really ends up canceled. The financial apocalypse for a lot of schools grabs the most attention, but let’s go back to those seniors. It’s one thing to offer a do-over on scholarships to spring sports athletes as happened earlier this year. There just aren’t that many per team.
UF alone has 17 scholarship seniors in football, 18 if former walk on Tanner Rowell gets his 2019 scholarship renewed (there is room under the 85 cap for him). That’s a lot more people for one team, and it’d be expensive. It also would make roster math and management very hard in a lot of places. It’s more difficult to try to make a scholarship extension for football seniors work to any degree, so I think it’s likely that they’d just lose out on their last years of eligibility rather than get a makeup year.
It will also be unfortunate for Dan Mullen’s career trajectory at Florida. With a lot of contributing seniors, a senior returning starter at quarterback, and a favorable schedule and other circumstances vis-a-vis division rival Georgia, the 2020 season was the time to make a big statement. Maybe he still wins a lot in whatever this season looks like, but it’s not going to be seen as the same as winning big in a standard season. His 2021 outfit, minus all 2020 seniors plus a couple other likely NFL Draft entrants, will have a lot more questions about it than the ’20 team did right after the Orange Bowl.
It is still proper to be most concerned about public health and controlling the pandemic. I and other writers here have and will continue to give that the proper due.
But we can also spare a little time to mourn the normalcy of the 2020 college football season. It won’t be like any other in living memory, and that’s too bad.