Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick joined Paul Finebaum on Monday afternoon and discussed a bit of the time frame as to when decisions regarding the 2020 college football season will occur. We will cover those in a later post when we get a copy of the entire interview. In the meantime, let’s examine probably the most straight-forward answer gave about how college football might look in 2020.
Will there be games college football fans without fans in the stands each Saturday this fall?
Certainly not if Swarbrick has any say in matters:
"I don't like the idea of our Game Day stadiums being just television studios – they need to be alive with people in attendance."
– Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick doesn't think we can have an entire college football season with no fans at the games.
Listen to his full comments: pic.twitter.com/miHgbGpgD9
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) April 6, 2020
You can listen to the full comments on the matter there but it certainly doesn’t appear Swarbrick has any interest in games being played without fans in the stands for more than a game or two at most.
I know some of us would watch whether there were 100,000 people in the stands or if there were zero. How many others are that way though? I’m curious how many of the casual college sports fans that mean so much in terms of television viewers, ratings and revenue, I doubt many stick around if the pomp and pageantry that makes Saturday’s in the fall unique simply isn’t there.