College football did happen in 2020 after all. On Saturday night, Central Arkansas edged out Austin Peay by a score of 24-17 after scoring a TD with barely more than a half-minute to go and picking off the final pass of the game.
It probably shouldn’t have been that close. Peay scored a 75-yard touchdown on the first play of the game but gained just 258 yards on 70 plays (3.7 per snap) the rest of the way. UCA gained 460 on 80 plays (5.8 per snap) on the night, but it had four drives of at least 40 yards apiece summing up to 221 of the total (48%) result in just three points: downs, pick, field goal, punt.
Did you watch the game? I’d imagine that if you are serious enough about college sports to subscribe to GC and get this newsletter, there’s a good chance you did. It was on ESPN, and by golly, it was actual, real American football. Even if most of it was dull outside of some long snapping follies until a wild scramble to the finish.
I did not happen to watch it. I only subscribe to live TV services from the start of Florida’s football season to the end of March Madness. This is not some kind of judge-y statement; I use streaming services for watching shows and movies regularly. Even before I quit year-round cable, I mainly only watched sports live and caught everything else off of the DVR.
FCS football is not enough for me to pull the trigger on a subscription. I’m not even sure which live TV streaming service to subscribe to yet because I’ve decided my old standby of YouTube TV got too expensive after its last price hike. I still have weeks before the Gators kick off, so I’m fine for now.
In those weeks, I’m sure that mountains will be made of every game that happens. At some point soon, there will be stories about how many Governors and Bears test positive for COVID-19 following their contest on Saturday. For once, I’m rooting for a 0-0 tie in a football context.
The thing to remember is that anything can happen in any one game. Not just on the scoreboard, but in terms of, well, anything. Most anything, anyway. A Division II team will never beat an FBS national title contender should such a matchup ever happen.
A clean prognosis after that game will be a salutary sight, but it won’t be enough to proclaim college football good to go. Just the same, if some number of them do test positive, it won’t mean that everyone needs to shut it all down. It may not be possible to pinpoint when the player(s) contracted the disease, and just because he or they did or didn’t spread it, it doesn’t mean every game will work exactly that way. The world can be chaotic. Again: almost anything can happen once.
We’ll need to monitor things as they go forward and more sports actually happen. The NBA’s bubble has been a complete success. The MLB’s bubble-less travel setup has not been. College football appears like it’ll have a hybrid of those, with some campuses open and others empty except for athletes and students who have nowhere else to live.
As for me, I’ll keep holding off on a TV subscription for now. If we get to the actual Power 5 games on September 12, it might be time to get Hulu Live TV or Sling TV or whatever. I’d like to wait until I know for sure that Florida will play, if only to get a guaranteed return on investment thanks to being able to write about the Gators for GC.
After all, the SEC medical experts have not yet cleared the conference to play actual games. Workouts came first, camps came next, but games are still verboten. For crying out loud, UF still has not put a 2020 roster up on the website.
Things are starting to feel real. There was an FCS game over the weekend, and there are FBS games scheduled for this week. They’re what is usually seen as the dregs of the season, like South Alabama vs. Southern Miss and Middle Tennessee vs. Army with a Navy-BYU matchup on Labor Day the undisputed headliner (though Arkansas State-Memphis could get wild Saturday night). There are scrimmage notes on the GC Insider Bullgator Den, ranging anywhere from a real comeback player candidate to promising freshmen to the first devastating injury.
Things won’t feel real to me, not entirely anyway, until the Orange and Blue are upgraded to a status of all systems go. The conference has to sign off on it first, but at least it sounds like the Gators are all doing their part. The next big test is the start of classes today, and we’ll know how sustainable the “no positive tests since July” streak is before the opener against Ole Miss.
A real start to the season is getting closer. There’s still a long way to go and a lot of things that need to go right, but the upcoming season hasn’t seemed this feasible since early March. Let’s hope it stays that way.