Exhaustive look at the options for the upcoming college football season. A team of reporters interviewed 60 coaches, including Matt Wells, ADs, conference commissioners, doctors, trainers, and it paints a pretty stark picture of what the game is staring at. It's not going to be business as usual.
What is clear from the stories is no football season would bankrupt nearly all athletic programs, especially on the heels of no March Madness. With that in mind, here are the following options in order, and none that anyone really wants, but here we are:
1. Conference-only schedule. It would buy some time, but it would crush G5 and FCS teams that depend on a big check from a Power 5 school. What of all Notre Dame games, Army-Navy, and traditional non-conf games: Fla-Fla State, Clemson-South Carolina, Georgia-GTech, etc.
2. Games with no fans. No one wants that, but it would be a way to at least salvage TV money. Ticket and suite revenue would be a huge loss, as well as the pageantry of the game. The Iron Bowl in an empty stadium? And would it still be safe for players, officials, and essential personnel and would they be quarantined from student body?
3. Spring season. A last resort, but if meant no season, it would happen. Feb-May football has all sorts of effects from weather to overlapping with other sports, to squeezing the NFL calendar on the draft, to the toll on some teams playing as many as 30 games in 11 months if the 2021 season was back to normal.
There's also the possibility of the "interrupted season" where a season may start in the fall, then COVID makes a return in the late fall before there's a vaccine. Coaches also said they'd need 8 weeks to get players ready for the season. A decision needs to happen, most agree, by mid-June. Best read on the situation I've seen.
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...ronavirus-affect-college-football-season-2020
What is clear from the stories is no football season would bankrupt nearly all athletic programs, especially on the heels of no March Madness. With that in mind, here are the following options in order, and none that anyone really wants, but here we are:
1. Conference-only schedule. It would buy some time, but it would crush G5 and FCS teams that depend on a big check from a Power 5 school. What of all Notre Dame games, Army-Navy, and traditional non-conf games: Fla-Fla State, Clemson-South Carolina, Georgia-GTech, etc.
2. Games with no fans. No one wants that, but it would be a way to at least salvage TV money. Ticket and suite revenue would be a huge loss, as well as the pageantry of the game. The Iron Bowl in an empty stadium? And would it still be safe for players, officials, and essential personnel and would they be quarantined from student body?
3. Spring season. A last resort, but if meant no season, it would happen. Feb-May football has all sorts of effects from weather to overlapping with other sports, to squeezing the NFL calendar on the draft, to the toll on some teams playing as many as 30 games in 11 months if the 2021 season was back to normal.
There's also the possibility of the "interrupted season" where a season may start in the fall, then COVID makes a return in the late fall before there's a vaccine. Coaches also said they'd need 8 weeks to get players ready for the season. A decision needs to happen, most agree, by mid-June. Best read on the situation I've seen.
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...ronavirus-affect-college-football-season-2020
