In the spring of a long time ago, when the weather was an ally, some college athletic leaders pointed to June 1 as a deadline to declare the fate of the football season. So that became June 15 … then July 1 … then July 15. The worse the prospect, the longer everyone wanted to postpone potentially catastrophic decisions.
And so the can has been kicked so far down the road that it has crossed state lines. Now here in the last week of July, just over a month from the season’s scheduled start, the battered can has stopped at a fork in that road. Finally decisions must be made.
College football this fall, right? If so, when? And how much?
This week should provide some answers. They may not be the final answers, but some plans must be agreed, or abandoned.
“When this (pandemic) started, we said, ‘OK, we have four months to solve it,'” an FBS commissioner said. Illustrated Sports. “Now we don’t have months to solve it. Everything is circular. We just go back and revisit it and rethink it. Everyone is doing their part, but the answers are not easy.
“We have 50 governors. We have state and local health officials. We have boards of directors and university presidents. Below them we have athletic directors, who are between a rock and a difficult place. We are all trying to assess risk tolerance and its twin responsibility. ”
BARNHART: This week will be one of the greatest in CFB history
Is there agreement on where we are going? Barely. At one end of the spectrum is a coach who sources said in a league conference call last week: “We have to start exchanging saliva here and see what happens.” At the other end of the spectrum are medical experts sitting on the conference advisory boards who are in no way in favor of exchanging saliva.
Santiago Flores-USA TODAY RED
So this is what might come down the pike this week, as the clock ticks:
- A model schedule for the Atlantic Coast Conference, which includes a proposed start date and a league championship game date, could be revealed on Wednesday.
The league’s athletic directors will meet Tuesday and are expected to send a finalized model proposal to the ACC presidents, who meet on Wednesday and can approve it. They could also return it to the ADs for further discussion at a meeting scheduled for Thursday. A third less desirable option: delay until next week, if other factors require it.
The first decision to make is the format. Sources told SI that these are the top two options as of this weekend: a 10-game league schedule, plus a non-conference game; or an eight-game league schedule, plus a non-conference game.
Along with that decision is the amount of Notre Dame factors in the mix. The Fighting Irish, a soccer independent but ACC member in most other sports, could play 10 league games and those results would count in the conference standings, according to Stadium’s Brett McMurphy.
Notre Dame already has six ACC opponents slated (Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Duke, Clemson, Georgia Tech and Louisville), but it could be hard to complete its schedule without additional help from the league. Their games against USC, Stanford and Wisconsin were already canceled when the Pac-12 and Big Ten announced that they would play league-only schedules. (The Irish are expected to keep the Navy on their agenda.) While acknowledging that an unprecedented Notre Dame season of membership in the soccer conference is on the table, an ACC source warned that “nothing has been decided yet.”
The cost of a season’s ticket for the Irish? Most likely a cut from her big NBC-generated television earnings. As one ACC source put it: “We need Notre Dame TV money as much as they need ACC games.”
Sources within the league say that the usual Atlantic and coastal divisional formats are likely to be ruled out this season in favor of increased regional programming to reduce travel expenses and, in theory, limit possible exposure to the coronavirus. Of course, potentially adding more games with Notre Dame, which is 350 miles from a single league school (Louisville), would run counter to that logic.
- If ACC announces its plans this week, will the Big 12 and Southeastern Conference do the same? That would also be in accordance with the “month-end” schedule the three have mentioned, but deliberations could extend until August for one or both conferences.
The leagues have been working in concert since Big Ten and Pac-12 made their respective decisions to cancel the non-conference game. They currently have 13 games scheduled among their members. ACC-SEC Games: Clemson-South Carolina; Louisville, Kentucky; Florida-State of Florida; Georgia-Georgia Tech; North Carolina-Auburn; Virginia-Georgia; State of Mississippi-State of North Carolina; and Arkansas-Notre Dame (more or less). The SEC-Big 12 games: Texas-LSU; Oklahoma-Tennessee; Mississippi-Baylor; and the state of Vanderbilt-Kansas. The ACC-Big 12 matchups: Florida State-West Virginia; and Kansas-Boston College.
If the SEC and Big 12 also go to a conference time plus one, look for the majority of those clashes to be the plus one. (Georgia would probably have to start its game against Virginia in favor of keeping the rivalry game against Georgia Tech.)
What will those leagues do? Neither of them has tilted their hand yet. It was notable, however, that the Big 12 made a couple of programming moves over the weekend: Oklahoma advanced its opening against the State of Missouri until August 29, and Kansas added southern Illinois to the calendar instead of a game canceled with New Hampshire. That game is also scheduled for August 29.
If Big 12 planned to cut to 10 games this week, those moves might not have been made. The state of Missouri would apparently be the most disposable opponent on the Sooners’ schedule. It makes a little more sense for Kansas, which has a couple of geographically troublesome non-conference games (Boston College coming to Lawrence and a road trip to the Carolina coast) and lost the New Hampshire matchup.
A third Big 12 school, TCU, said last week that it is looking to add an opponent by August 29. Fort Worth Star-Telegram He reported that it could be UNLV, which like the Horned Frogs has lost a season opener matchup with a Pac-12 opponent. A source said other Power-5 schools may also be looking for a new Zero Week game scheduled.
- If the Power 5 leagues continue to deconstruct the schedule outside of the conference, the backlash from the Group of Five conferences will quickly follow.
The Mid-American Conference and Mountain West were hit hard by Big Ten and Pac-12 reducing their schedules. American Athletic, the US Conference, and the Sun Belt are squirming in the wind, waiting to see what the harm will be for them if the ACC, SEC, and Big 12 launch games against their members.
If this ends badly for them in turns losing games that are supposed to pay up to seven figures as collateral, then legal challenges are likely to follow. Prominent sports lawyer Tom Mars says several Group of Five schools recently contacted him, but he declined to name them.
“Based on my review of various contracts for non-conference games, Power 5 schools will have to contend if they try to escape responsibility for liquidated damages to the G5 school that they agreed to host this year,” Mars told SI. “None of the contracts that I have seen have a force majeure clause that specifically covers an epidemic or a pandemic. While every force majeure clause I’ve reviewed refers to an “act of God,” Power 5 schools will find little support in jurisprudence if they try to avoid liability based on those three words. In addition to the difficulties Power 5 programs will face in dealing with deficiencies in their contracts, they will also have to convince a court that “we decided not to play” means the same as “we cannot play.” Like soccer, that kind of “Ave Maria” legal argument is rarely successful. “
- We may have to wait a little longer to find out if all this scheduling is just a busy job that will eventually be postponed or canceled.
The NCAA Board of Governors meets again on August 4. On Friday, she declined to call on whether to postpone the Division I fall sports championships until spring, in part at the request of the Football Oversight Committee. Even with the loss of time, they asked for another 11 days to measure the number of viruses and monitor how the professional sports leagues are doing with the return to competition.
This has been part of the process of kicking the can: the NCAA is waiting for the conferences to declare their intentions, and the conferences are waiting to see if the NCAA is willing to rescue them from some difficult decisions by doing it for them. If all the parties involved Really want to play the waiting game, they can probably avoid going offline until mid-August.
Meanwhile, there are conflicting signs everywhere. Some schools are scheduling games or speeding up the start of their competition; others (Michigan State and Rutgers more recently) are sending their entire teams to quarantine after multiple positive tests. The state of Arizona launched a novel concept to the mix on Sunday by redshirting all of its men’s and women’s swim and dive teams, basically taking the year off and planning to try again in 2021–22. Other sports programs with no income are likely to follow that innovative decision. “I heard that a dozen coaches come up with the idea (of a red team jersey), but as a hypothesis,” a swimming source said.
If other sports are disconnecting from the competition, can FBS soccer do it alone? An athletic director who had been pessimistic for weeks about playing soccer now says the urgency is there to try, signaling financial responsibility for the rest of the athletics department. Another athletic director who had been quite optimistic while playing said last week that he doesn’t see it happening.
Two potentially important factors to consider: what happens when players start “swapping saliva” in full contract practice; and what happens when students return and increase the campus population.
At this point, there is no rational hope for a tangible national downward trend in terms of general cases and hospitalizations. Governors and other state officials may make decisions that mandate sports entities. Otherwise, the university administrators will be the ones who make very difficult decisions, not only about sports, but also about all their campuses. What it all boils down to, like the anonymous commissioner mentioned above, could be risk tolerance.
.
