LOS ANGELES _ Every morning, around 9:30 in Birmingham, Ala., Greg Sankey gathers the updated information from the Southeastern Conference's research on a return to playing college football in the fall. He dials the number and drops into a teleconference with the other Power Five league commissioners.
Sankey's notes often reflect a reality far removed from that of his colleagues, particularly the one who calls in from the Bay Area, jumping into his workday early and hoping to keep pace with peers who don't encounter near as many roadblocks.
The call Wednesday must have been a doozy for Larry Scott, protector of Pac-12 interests. While 13 of 14 SEC presidents paved a path for Sankey, announcing their intention to bring students back to campus for the fall semester, Scott was busy reacting to another potential setback.
A day earlier, news broke that Los Angeles County, home to USC and UCLA, intended to extend its stay-at-home order by three months, which would push it into August.
If college football teams would need six weeks to prepare for a season that started Sept. 5, requiring players to be working out together by mid-to-late July, such a move could put the Trojans and Bruins behind schedule. This led to further speculation that USC would not be able to play Alabama in Arlington, Texas, in the season opener _ and USC athletic director Mike Bohn immediately debunking that notion on Twitter.
The announcement Tuesday by the California State University system that it planned to operate virtually in the fall did not directly affect the Pac-12, but was an indication of political winds that sweep the opposite direction from what the SEC faces.
With the state-by-state response to the novel coronavirus dividing the country more by the day, the Power Five commissioners are attempting a seemingly ridiculous task: align the actions of the 130-team Football Bowl Subdivision, made up of schools from 42 states.
"There's a lot of unique pressures, and there's different cultures throughout the country, and different cultures result in different public policy sometimes, and different pressure on commissioners," Scott said. "But we all need each other to play a full college football season."
Despite the uncertainty that is sure to hover over higher education for many months _ even in the South, presidents understand the virus' behavior in the next six to eight weeks will ultimately decide their plans for the fall _ the Power Five leagues are preparing for a full 12-week schedule that, as ever, leads into the College Football Playoff.
To pull it off, Scott said it's key that the commissioners are "locked at the hip."
But regionalism is at the heart of the settlement of all college football arguments. Would the SEC, the dominant force in the sport the last 15 years, and Big 12, which also has the overwhelming support of its presidents to bring students back, really wait around for their brethren in virus-ravaged parts of the country?
"We're more connected now and certainly communicating more now than we have at any time," Sankey said. "People have tried to parse statements about, well, this region is going to go this direction, that region will go another direction. In reality we're going to keep learning. We have states opening that will provide information and context for decision-making. The strong desire and preference is that we can play as scheduled.
"What's the inflection point for different decision-making? That's not one I'm going to try to predict right now."
"Power Five" took on a literal meaning in 2014 when the NCAA gave the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Atlantic Coast Conference autonomy to make their own rules.
The FBS, college football's top rung, is unique in that it is made up of NCAA member schools but its structure is governed by the conferences, which negotiate their own billion-dollar TV deals and make decisions about the championship format. There is no NCAA FBS champion.
The Power Five commissioners _ Sankey, Scott, Bob Bowlsby (Big 12), Kevin Warren (Big Ten) and John Swofford (ACC) _ and the presidents of their schools will be able to chart their own course in regard to football. Decisions on return to play for all other college sports will come from the NCAA.
This is an important distinction to make, especially when NCAA President Mark Emmert said last week, "College athletes are college students, and you can't have college sports if you don't have colleges open and having students on (campus). You don't ever want to put student-athletes at greater risk than the rest of the student body."
Since most athletic departments depend on football revenue to keep their budgets afloat, Power Five commissioners can't afford to view the circumstances of reopening that simply. To them, and to their vested parties, the answers lie not in black-and-white solutions but in figuring out how to move forward in the gray of a changing world in which the virus calls the shots and society is asked to adjust on the fly.
"There was no undergraduate or graduate class when I was a student that said here's how you deal with a long-term pandemic," Sankey said. "So two months into it we continue to learn. We're building the bridge as we cross the river, and we're writing the instruction manual as we do so."
