It’s been a week for college football. Let’s break down where things stand, for my own sake as much as anyone else’s:
Big Ten, Pac-12, MAC, Mountain West, FCS
Trying to play a spring season, but nowhere near concrete plans. Some teams could play nonconference games.
SEC
While the narrative seems to be that the SEC is going all damn-the-torpedoes on this, Greg Sankey’s actual words indicate the SEC isn’t committed to playing football so much as they’re committed to waiting and making the decision at a later date. They’ve pushed their start date back to September 26th, which seems to be the latest they could start with a ten-game schedule and a conference championship game before Christmas. Of course, they could always consolidate to an eight-game schedule, or a six-game schedule, or a double-elimination tournament, or having the players play each other in Madden. The point is, the SEC can do whatever it wants, and nothing should be considered final until it’s finished.
Speaking of the word “final…”
ACC
Florida State president John Thrasher evidently told his trustees yesterday that the ACC’s presidents and chancellors would be making a “final, final” decision on football last night.
Obviously, that turned out to be false.
There are two things to note here:
- As in the SEC, nothing should be considered final until it’s finished (this is a good rule of thumb overall during the Covid-time).
- Florida State seems to really want to play football, and is trying to throw its weight around to make it happen.
This latter point is backed up by FSU allegedly hiding coronavirus test results from even its own players.
As it stands, the ACC is set to open play September 12th, with one nonconference game still an option for teams (if they can find an opponent). There are more open dates in their schedule than that of the SEC, which, along with the nonconference game, is why they’re scheduled to start earlier. Again, we’ll see.
Big 12
The Big 12 remains fairly aligned with the SEC and ACC, though the rumor mill had them as the fulcrum, or at least the swing vote, for the whole sport this week. As it stands, they’re set to open play on September 12th, with each team playing a nonconference game that day—though it should be noted that Baylor’s schedule lists their nonconference opponent as “TBA” and Kansas’s schedule doesn’t list a nonconference opponent at this time.
NCAA
The NCAA has wiped its hands of all of this, canceling national championships in fall sports. Notably, though, the NCAA does not control the…
College Football Playoff
…which says it’s still going ahead as planned, with Selection Sunday slated for the day after the SEC Championship.
AAC
As of now, the AAC is also planning to attempt to play football this fall. The first game involving an AAC team is scheduled for Thursday, September 3rd (Cincinnati vs. Austin Peay, whose FCS conference has canceled its season). Hypothetically, this season could be the stuff of dreams for the AAC, if they have an undefeated champion and other leagues’ runners up muddle through it. But we’re a long way from that kind of speculation.
Conference USA, Sun Belt
Like the AAC, Conference USA and the Sun Belt are each also still planning on attempting to play. Like the AAC, each still has one game scheduled (at least according to the ESPN schedule) on Thursday, September 3rd: South Alabama at Southern Miss.
The Barking Crow
Obviously, we don’t get to make a decision on this. If we did, we’d say the leagues should scrap attempts at a fall season and work on building the most concrete plan for a spring season they can (this is what we’d argue for the other fall sports as well). We don’t know if we’ll have a vaccine or highly effective treatment by January, but we’ll certainly have a better understanding of the virus, and it seems likely we’ll have higher immunity nationally. Rather than a piecemeal, uncertain “season” this fall played through the concerns of a lot of the athletes, it seems like there’s an opportunity here to do what should have been done in April—figure out a strong gameplan. Sadly, instead of following the NHL and NBA methods, college athletics decisionmakers seem to be following that of the MLB (delay, take no action, and hope someone else makes the decision or the decision becomes easy), and when Rob Manfred is the guy you’re emulating, things aren’t going well.
That said, we’ll obviously be keeping an eye on this, and if college football tries to start this fall, we’ll have a model for who makes any playoff, or at least who wins each conference. We’re making no steps right now towards rolling out that model, but if things are still a go as September 3rd and September 12th approach, we’ll take those steps.
