The Vice President of the United State turned his attention to College football during a 30-minute call with the College Football Playoff Management Committee and the news wasn’t exactly what college football fans wanted to hear on Wednesday afternoon.
The committee’s general consensus to Vice President Mike Pence was that there will be no college football until students are back on campus.
“Our players are students. If we’re not in college, we’re not having contests,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told reporters on a conference call. “Our message was, we need to get universities and colleges back open, that we were education-based programs, and we weren’t going to have sports until we had something closer to normal college going on,”
The committee is made up of the commissioners of the 10 conferences and Notre Dame’s Athletic Director. They manage the day-to-day operations of the College Football Playoff Adminstration LLC.
President Donald Trump and the White House have been very supportive of sports returning as soon as possible. Wednesday’s meeting with Pence was to get the opinion of the leaders of the major conferences to see their thoughts on how this could be made possible at the collegiate level.
The NCAA has less power in this than the Power Five conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), which is why the White House sought out speaking with the CFP Management Committee.
On Tuesday the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases explained how professional sports could return given massive restrictions on housing and testing every participant, coach, and official, as well as playing the games in empty stadiums.
We’re roughly one month into this pandemic here in the United States. There is reason, or at least hope, for optimism that sports will return. The logistics of making that a reality are monumental but are being worked on each day.