In this unprecedented time for college sports, we’ll work on some of the key questions. Can a spring football season really happen?
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Can a spring football season in 2021 happen?
My first reaction was, “absolutely not.”
The logistics are a nightmare, there’s no real point, and the idea of playing in the spring seemed like nothing more than blather by the Big Ten and other leagues to cushion the blow of – let’s call it what it is – cancelling the 2020 fall football season.
But semantics do matter here. Instead of using the word cancel, postpone is more to the point, considering the idea will be for the spring of 2021 to serve as the 2020 fall campaign.
If there’s money to be recouped from a spring session, college football will find a way to play.
Can it really happen?
Jeff Brohm seems to think so
The Purdue head coach – along with all but killing the exact column I was doing – came up with a very detailed, very interesting idea on how to structurally play in the spring. He’s not alone, with Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz, among others, claiming that it’s possible.
At the very least, it’s a jumping off point for a sport that wasn’t exactly proactive in its planning for what could happen if the virus didn’t go away in time to have a fall season.
The coaches are going to want this. A football coach without a football season is about as useful as a remote control without batteries. If there’s a shot to play football, coaches will sell it.
Oh yeah, that virus thing
If this all starts up in late January or early February, that means teams will need to be ready to start practicing for real in mid-December – that’s four months away from right now.
There’s not going to be a working vaccine available, but the real hope is for better, faster, and more reliable testing – which was the hope back in mid-March, too.
It’s essentially what the Pac-12 said in its guide as part of the rationale for halting fall sports, specifically football.
“Testing capacity needs to increase to allow for more frequent testing, performed closer to game time, and with more rapid turn-around time to prevent spread of infection and enhance the safety of all student-athletes, coaches, and staff involved, particularly in situations where physical distancing and mask wearing cannot be maintained. This will require access to significant capacity of point-of-care testing and rapid turn-around time, which is currently very limited.”
This is it. This is everything.
For all the planning, all the bickering, and all the different opinions across the various social media platforms, a spring football season in 2021 – and, not to get into this yet, but a 2021 fall campaign, too – isn’t going to happen at anything close to normal, if at all, without a way to be almost certain that everyone on the field is fine.
So let’s say that around December 10ish we have a solid set of national protocols that all the colleges and conferences are cool with.
NEXT: Eligibility, NFL Draft, recruiting
Eligibility
This is a whole lot easier than it’s being made out to be … for now.
This will be a total mess when and if players start to opt out and keep their eligibility for down the road, but that has to be dealt with no matter what happens with spring ball.
Basically, you transfer a football season that was supposed to be held from late August until mid-January of 2020 and early 2021, and you move it to late January to around early-Mayish before finals kick in.
Everything stays the same. If you were a sophomore with three seasons of eligibility remaining in September of 2020, football-wise you’re a sophomore with three seasons of eligibility remaining in the winter of 2021.
NFL Draft
Whatever.
How many NFL players do you think each college football team has?
Only three schools – LSU, Ohio State and Michigan – lost ten players or more to the 2020 NFL Draft. Only ten schools lost five players or more to the draft. For the most part, everyone outside of the elite would likely lose one or two starters and would be more than fine.
Of course Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, and some other big-names would lose parts, but it’s not like everyone would get gutted. On the flip side, players might want to stick around to up their stock.
There are two ways this might work. 1) If the Trevor Lawrences of the world want to leave tp preserve and prepare, cool. Go be a professional. If they want to play more college football, then they can wait until 2022. Or, more likely …
2) The process gets moved a bit with a combine in late May and a draft in mid-June. NFL talent types would whine, and it would mess up free agency, but it’s workable.
Recruiting
Double whatever.
If anything, no fall football and a move to the spring could be a boost considering there’s now more of an emphasis on the December 16th early recruiting period.
Freshman won’t be eligible for the spring – they start rolling in the fall just like normal – and to all those who’ll complain about coaches having to do their normal spring recruiting while also coaching, they’ll survive. Coaches are ALWAYS recruiting.
NEXT: Weather, two seasons, how many games?
Weather
Triple whatever.
I’ve got this.
I grew up in Minneapolis, now live in Chicago, and spent my entire life stupidly living in cold places.
I’ve lived through -40. I’ve lived through a gajillion feet of snow. I lived for a time in a bedroom in Minnesota with no heat. That was nothing.
The two coldest moments in my entire life were 2) in Evanston for a Northwestern game – when I went in shorts on a 66-degree day that turned to rain and 40 by the second quarter – and 1) a Michigan State game in East Lansing – when the weather was supposed to be in the mid-50s, but turned into 33 with a delightful rain/sleet mixture. That was the only time in my life I smoked a regular cigarette, thinking anything associated with fire might warm me up.
The weather isn’t exactly Cancun for many schools in November.
Oh yeah, and they’re football players. They’ll be fine no matter what the weather is.
Besides, not everyone is dumb enough to live six months of the year in a refrigerator. It’s sort of nice in Tucson and Palo Alto in March.
Will someone please think of the children?
This one has merit.
How can you possibly stop a fall season because you’re worried about everyone’s safety and then ask football players to potentially play two seasons in ten months?
Here’s your chance, player movement.
No more of this #WeWantToPlay hoo-ha that gives everyone warm fuzzies but kneecaps your leverage. You want the major college football business people to have you play – let’s be honest here – at least 20 games in ten months? Fine …
Demands deserve to be met, and it all starts with the players “bill of rights” being discussed by members of Congress. It has to be implemented in some way so the needs, health and safety of the players are in the hands of a group that fully represents them.
The schedule would have to be spaced out, and there would need to be a delay to the 2021 season to allow for as much rest as possible. Conferences would also have to create a significant enough spring campaign to make it something more than a gimmick. So …
How many games do you play?
Again, assuming there’s an actual plan to play around the virus, the season should be January 15thish through early April with ten games spread out.
Eight games won’t feel like a real season, but ten over 14 weeks could work …
And it’ll probably be eight games.
The idea of bowls in the spring gets blown off, but you have a regular College Football Playoff that’s moved from mid-January of 2021 to early May.
Again, everything that was planned for 2020 fall gets moved a few months down the road. The spring season has to have legitimacy, otherwise it just looks like a naked money grab, which it is, but …
NEXT: Fall season games, College Football Playoff, and will there be a season?
And the fall season?
Who knows how things are going to look 12 months from now, but if this real world nightmare finally slows down or stops, everything is going to be about normalcy.
The idea of getting back into a rhythm of spring practices, training, a summer off, fall camp, and a good old 12-game schedule might seem extremely appealing over any contrived spring thing that doesn’t exactly feel right.
Figure on more of an 8+2 sort of model for the fall and maybe a 9+1 for the Big 12. Several Power Five programs aren’t going to be thrilled at the idea of going 4-6 – they’re going to want those paycheck games – and Group of Five programs are going to really need to play as many non-conference games as possible.
But don’t put it past the conferences and for college football business types to decide that 2021 fall football goes on as if nothing happened.
And the championship? And the College Football Playoff?
Simple. Each league has a conference championship game, there might be a few of the giant bowls – but not all of them – and the College Football Playoff will be the College Football Playoff in May. The committee will come up with the four best teams, and it’ll be a go from there.
Enough … Can a college football spring season happen?
Yeah, it can, and it might go ahead because the athletic departments need money, but why do you want it?
It might be fun for the novelty – there’s something quirky-enjoyable about the NBA and NHL in August – but there’s no getting past that this would be all about the money for the conferences that failed to figure out how to keep everyone safe for fall football.
But mostly, you really, really can’t make college athletes play two college football seasons in the span of a year unless you’re prepared to make it very, very worth their while – colleges would sit and eat the lost opportunity before having a spring session with a changed up pay-the-players system.
Of course, college football players are college football players. There will be some who won’t want to play – and, predictably, will be honked at on social media for not being tough enough – but most of them want to do what they love. Most will want to give it a go no matter what after going a full year without playing.
And then there’s this.
1. There still won’t necessarily be fans in the stands – at least, not enough of them to save the various athletic departments.
2. If there’s 2020 fall football in any way, forget it. The Big Ten, Pac-12, MAC, Mountain West, and a few independents are going to play spring football while everyone else gets time off to rest up? Nah.
The ACC, Big 12 and SEC are going to turn things around for the spring if they play in the fall? Not bloody likely.
Best guess? If all of college football is shut down for the 2020 fall, put it at 50/50 for the spring. If some football is played by some of the conferences, put it at 20%.
