It may seem inevitable, that the pandemic will outflank football and the college season will be lost. It would be the safe, easy call for the Big Ten, to shut it down as the Mid-American Conference did, as some health experts are recommending, and revisit it in the spring.
The tough call is to wait a bit longer, to keep testing and learning. I'd make the tough call, for now, and push ahead. I don't quite understand the rush to finality. More and more players are publicly pleading to play, amid only scattered virus outbreaks inside programs. Schedules were revised and protocols put in place precisely for this scenario, if a delay was necessary.
In the next week or so, the Big Ten and Pac-12 might indeed make the easy call, and the rest of college football could follow. I just hope everyone fully grasps what it means.
It means a financial calamity for many schools. Programs such as Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State, with gigantic empty stadiums, could lose upwards of $100 million in revenue. And please, stop money-shaming. Of course the revenue matters, not just to pay expensive coaches but to fund opportunities for more than 12,000 scholarship FBS football players, as well as all the other sports.
Could it be recouped in a spring season? Doubtful. Too many players would be bumping up against pro timelines, too many eligibility issues, too many logistical nightmares. Who's to say the COVID situation will be over by then anyhow? And I'm sorry, no matter how much you shrink the season, you'd still be asking college athletes to play upwards of 20-22 games in one calendar year, assuming you can even start the 2021 fall season on time.
Big Ten presidents and chancellors decided over the weekend to delay a vote on whether to play football this fall, although the conference announced full padded practices would be paused for now, meaning helmet-only workouts. This was just a few days after the league released a 10-game schedule with flexibility to start later than Sept. 5.
"We are very hopeful to have a Big Ten football season," commissioner Kevin Warren said last week. "We're approaching this entire process on a day-to-day basis. We're gathering medical information daily. We're communicating with all of our constituents in the Big Ten, we're communicating with our student-athletes and having dialogue with them."
