The offices of the University of Texas athletic administration are closed, so of course athletic director Chris Del Conte is going to work.
"It's like 'The Shining,'" Del Conte said Wednesday morning of the empty offices in Austin.
Never thought of Chris Del Conte as Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance, but these days everyone is capable of saying, "Heeeere's Johnny!"
Before delving into this, Del Conte mentioned something about our current era of the coronavirus, "In my opinion I think this has been here for a long, long time. I don't think this just got here."
Agreed.
What was unfathomable one month ago is now up for discussion _ namely, that delaying, or even canceling, college football is now something that athletic directors and university administrators must at least consider. For college athletics, losing football would have the power of 10,000 nuclear bombs dropped in a bathtub.
Their hope is baseball. Major League Baseball. If baseball comes back, that gives them the chance to avoid having to detonate those bombs.
MLB has agreed to a deal with the MLB Player's Association to play as many games as possible, even if that means playing in empty stadiums. MLB is currently suspended until mid-May.
If baseball opens, even partially, it would mean that all of football would have a good chance of not losing any games. Initial practices may be delayed, but all of the games would go on.
"They all go in hand. MLB, NBA and OTAs (in the NFL)," Del Conte said. "Any social gathering that is given the green light will signal for everyone it's plausible for us to get back together.
"At least to me it's all the same, it doesn't make a difference. It's physical activity and it means they can be next to each other."
Future sporting events are being canceled months down the line. The latest casualty is tennis' top event, Wimbledon, which was scheduled to run from late June to mid-July. They'll be back in 2021. College football is officially on the clock.
This scenario was deemed too extreme only a week ago. True, college football's spring practices had been canceled, but altering the start of the fall campaign by deciding in March to suspend practices that would be held in late July felt a bit much.
But just seven days later, which in the coronavirus era equals 70 years, delaying football now feels plausible.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban previously said he hoped the NBA would return by mid-May. He told ESPN's Get Up on Tuesday, "I have no idea" when it will return.
The mayor of Toronto extended the ban on public gatherings until the end of June, but sporting events are somehow exempt.
According to Brett McMurphy of Stadium, one major college president proposed moving the 2020 football season to the spring.
That proposal seems ridiculous, at least as of right now. In the next 15 minutes, such a proposal may seem rational and reasonable.
"Look at Italy," Del Conte said, "a soccer game was their bomb."
On February 19, a Champions League soccer in Milan, Italy, is now thought to be the culprit of catastrophic outbreaks throughout the nation. Just 48 hours before the game, Italy had its first locally transmitted case of COVID-19.
There were 40,000 people in the stands for a match that is now called "Game Zero." Fans, journalists and players from the teams in Spain and Italy have all since tested positive for the coronavirus, and helped to accelerate its spread.
The sports world wants to avoid having that scene play out again.
"You are forecasting for various scenarios in a lot of different ways," Del Conte said. "I believe we will know a lot more in the next two months. We will know what social distancing has done, and it will give us a clearer picture of what this timeline is."
So college athletic administrators all over the U.S. go to work, or work from home, preparing now for a year that may not have football.
There is confidence that by the start of "football season," we will all have returned to a new normal, and that the games will be back.
Once baseball says "Play ball," football will its door opened.
"Yes, I am worried," North Texas athletic director Wren Baker said. "I'm not sitting around being negative. The way I deal with it is to try to put contingencies plans in place for a variety of scenarios, and hopefully we don't need those plans."
