While we wonder if college football is going to be played this fall, we now know that high school football in the state of California won’t be played at any point before December of 2020.
The California Interscholastic Federation sent out a release Monday morning in which it said that fall sports will begin “in December 2020 or January 2021.” This obviously includes football and represents a big disruption in the larger sports landscape.
The last day for CIF football section playoffs would be April 10, 2021. The last day for state or regional championships is April 17.
Consider this the first in a series of events which are simultaneously mind-blowing and yet expected. This is obviously mind-blowing in that we are forced to contemplate a world — in California and surely in other states — where September, October, and November Friday nights will not involve high school football. It is hard to wrap the mind around that point.
Yet, even though this represents enormous upheaval — with budgetary damage being done to athletic programs throughout California’s high school infrastructure — it is also an outcome people can see as entirely logical.
No one WANTED this, but as with the school reopening issue, most Americans — while hoping schools can be reopened — are seeing that government is not responding adequately enough to make such reopenings possible. Government is not responding adequately enough to make the playing of scholastic sports possible. We all want a situation in which we could have high school and college football. We all want a situation in which schools can reopen. It would be the best outcome for everyone. Americans aren’t divided in terms of what they actually want. They’re divided in terms of what they see as politically and medically workable.
The California Interscholastic Federation obviously thinks that in this very fluid and very uncertain situation, playing football in the fall is far too much of a risk at this point. It’s terrible… and yet it’s hard to argue against at this point.
If we acknowledge that it was always going to be a lot harder for college football to play games this fall than the NFL, the idea that high schools could play was a much more remote possibility than college football ever getting off the ground.
A story that is mind-blowing and earth-shattering yet completely expected is precisely the kind of story we have had to adjust to in 2020, a year unlike any other in our lives — or in the history of the United States.