Already a strange time, it’s been an especially weird few days for college football. It sounds like the season’s about to get canceled, but it’s taking a while, and a collection of Power Five players stepped up to speak for all seven thousand of them (or however many there are) last night and snuck labor issues into the middle of this and the Republican Party thinks having a college football season will help their campaigning this fall but the Democratic Party thinks not having a college football season will help their campaigning this fall and evidently five Big Ten athletes who had covid now have that heart issue that ended my high school buddy’s college running career but also evidently if we don’t have college football we just won’t have college?
Wild times.
The money seems to be on an attempted spring football season, having hopefully figured out how to keep college students healthy on campus after some trial and error this semester. But we’ll see. The ACC, SEC, and Big 12 seem to be (in order) the most in favor of getting college football season over with, and that makes sense, because those guys know the same thing the Big Ten and Pac-12 know:
The NIT would completely outshine a spring college football season.
Indiana’s on board. Stanford’s on board. Under Armour is calling up UCLA to see if they’ll take them back. The Big Ten and the Pac-12 think they’ll be big players in this year’s premier postseason college basketball tournament that features 32 teams and ends in Madison Square Garden, and that’s got them thinking they shouldn’t let the football leagues and the ACC get any spotlight this fall. On the other side, the football leagues and Dabo Swinney (who has ACC President Clay Aiken tied up in his basement) are terrified of what competing against the NIT would do to their ratings.
It’s pretty clear-cut. The virus may decide. But the NIT’s the elephant on the socially-distanced football field.
