Most indications point to the Big Ten and/or the Pac-12 postponing college football for the fall on Tuesday. What is less certain but highly possible is the collection of the Power Five conferences all packing up and going home for the fall. Some think the Big 12, ACC and SEC will wait to see if they can play. Others think the SEC will be the one final holdout. That is speculative, but the Big Ten and Pac-12 calling it quits for fall seems almost certain at this point.
One doesn’t need to think very long to realize that if two Power Five conferences fold up the tent, there is no College Football Playoff or bowl season. There is no national championship or Heisman Trophy. Any possible attempts to play involving the Big 12, ACC and SEC would be regular-season only, with no stepping stone to a Rose Bowl or Sugar Bowl playoff semifinal… because there won’t be semifinals. A bunch of schools would play a small collection of games and make a measure of television money… at least, that’s the last-gasp scenario for some football to be played this fall.
Good luck selling that to the athletes in those conferences. Some certainly want to play and should not be criticized for wanting to play; others, however, won’t want to play (and should also not be criticized for expressing their wish — athletes are the last people who should be blamed in all this).
The Big 12, ACC, and especially the SEC might hold out a little longer, but it seems at this point they would merely be delaying the inevitable.
The walls really are closing in.
It wasn’t yet time the past few weeks to discuss spring football, but it is now. It was worth trying to play football this fall, but now we can try to make a real exploration of spring football.
We’re not going to delve into ALL the details of spring football in one piece; this is a layered, multifaceted conversation. Let’s start by noting some of the most important factors in making spring football happen. This is not an implied statement that football should (or shouldn’t) happen in the spring, merely a levelheaded assessment of the main obstacles and challenges standing in the way of spring college football.
Let’s offer five basic challenges (because the list could go on forever; start with a few core problems and go from there):
- Unionization/formal representation of athletes. We can see in the merged #WeAreUnited and #WeWantToPlay movement from players Sunday night, which was spearheaded in an immediate context by Trevor Lawrence but was given wings by the conference statements from athletes over the preceding week, that the movement toward unionization of college athletes now has real legs, or at least more than ever before. The veil has been lifted and everyone can see that if football IS going to be played in the spring — or at any point before August of 2021 — a movement toward unionization or at least formal representation of athletes will have to happen in some form. It might not be a well-developed form, but it will not merely be player councils or Pac-12 athletes having a two-hour phone exchange with league executives.
- The government’s response. This is NOT a politicization of sports; the pandemic IS and always WAS a political problem in which political choices were (and still are) unavoidably needed to address all sorts of problems. If Donald Trump is re-elected, college presidents might be able to make certain requests of his administration in November, without the need for a transition of leadership in late January. However, if a new president is elected in November, there will be a two-month transition period in which — let’s be honest — Joe Biden will have bigger problems than college sports, and it might be hard to get anything from the government to help college sports until the middle of winter in 2021. Remember: This doesn’t mean college sports aren’t very important — they are! It means that other problems (evictions, people going hungry, schools providing in-person instruction, and of course, the medical aspects of the coronavirus, to name just a few concerns) carry even more weight in a time of crisis. The government will have to be a part of this process; its inertia caused this mess with college football on several fronts.
- A vaccine for COVID-19. Where will we be on this front in January, February and March? Pretty big question.
- A bubble plan. Could college football deliver this? The unionization piece comes first, but from the unionization piece — if it is achieved in relatively short order — a bubble plan could emerge. Unless a vaccine is ready, a bubble would seem necessary to allow for spring football to be played. This bubble — in light of what the NBA and NHL have achieved — would amount to a professional-scale response by college football. Accordingly, players would have to be given hazard pay and guaranteed health care. Spring football could not take place without that and some other significant concessions to athletes.
- The big picture. If No. 1 (unionization) and No. 4 (a bubble) both become reality in the near future (I’m not predicting they will), giving us the two short-term transformations needed to facilitate spring football, college sports would obviously have to then think about its longer-term structural existence and how it would have to be overhauled. This wouldn’t be light tweaking on the edges; it would have to be a substantial remaking of the whole athletic-industrial complex.
Want to discuss spring football? Let’s do it… because if we want to do it, those are the main challenges, with plenty of other smaller challenges not even listed.
The power brokers of college sports — brought to this point of crisis — have a lot of work to do.