We are getting close to the time when big decisions will have to be made about college sports in general and college sports in particular.
Start with Friday’s NCAA Board of Governors meeting, in which the board will vote on whether to suspend/postpone the various NCAA-sponsored sports which normally play in the fall. FBS college football is run by the College Football Playoff, not the NCAA. FCS college football IS run by the NCAA, just to be clear. FBS football exists on its own separate island, creating an obvious possibility in which non-FBS activities are suspended while the FBS tries to move forward.
Nicole Auerbach of The Athletic filed this detailed report, gathering perspectives and insights from athletic directors and other college sports insiders across the spectrum of opinion. You can see from Auerbach’s reportage how messy, conflicted, and fractured college sports leaders truly are.
You can read the link if you subscribe to The Athletic, but we’ll make sure you get to see the most important segments of the article.
A few different passages display the differences of opinion between administrators who would like to see the FBS fall college football season postponed, and those who would like to wait a few more weeks to have to make that decision, in the hope that the season can still be saved.
Here is one quote:
“If the NCAA would just wake up out of its trance and just say, ‘We’re not doing fall championships,’ that gives everybody (the cover) that they need,” an FBS athletic director said. “Then, we can start to look at alternatives and answer questions for our coaches and our athletes.
“It’s frustrating to be treading water right now. … They’ve got to lead the way.”
Another quote voices a very similar view:
“’But what is going to change over the next three weeks?’, a Division I athletic director in a basketball-centric conference said. ‘Are we going to have a precipitous drop in the number of cases? Why wait?'”
“’Theoretically, (the NCAA) could wait until the week before the championships to make this decision, but that’s not a great experience for the student-athletes. At the end of the day, can you give clarity to the student-athletes? Why aren’t we saying, ‘Enough is enough. Let’s put a pause to this’?”
The other side of the divide — the faction which wants to wait as long as possible, hope that COVID-19 statistics improve, and save a fall season — is represented in this portion of the article:
“But some very powerful portions of the membership want the NCAA to continue to wait — and they may succeed in their efforts to delay a vote until the first week of August at least. (‘If not before that, that’s when we need a green light, red light or yellow light,’ the same FBS athletic director said.) The Athletic obtained a copy of a letter sent by the Division I Football Oversight Committee to the Board of Governors on Tuesday asking the board to take ‘a patient approach’ toward fall sports and avoid making ‘an immediate decision’ to cancel fall championships. The oversight committee believes that a delay in decision-making would allow conferences and individual schools to have ‘ample latitude to continue to evaluate the viability of playing football in the fall.’”
We shall see what happens in the Friday Board of Governors meeting.
As we told you earlier this week, big news is coming; we just don’t know what KIND of big news is about to break.