All about the COVID-19 tests
The College Football Playoff championship game Monday night between Alabama and Ohio State will conclude the strangest and most contentious year in the modern history of the sport.
In the initial stages of the pandemic, there was dismissiveness about its potential to wreak havoc on a season that was still several months away. Over the spring and early summer, that evolved into utter confusion about how to proceed, exposing cracks in the professed solidarity among the FBS conferences.
In August, the Big Ten and Pac-12 bailed on the fall season while the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast pressed ahead. The Big 12’s decision to side with the latter group is the biggest reason college football was played at all in 2020 and eventually brought everyone back into the fold.
Now that we are at the finish line, it would be fair to say that the decision to play during a pandemic — as cumbersome as it might have been at times — saved college athletics from a financial calamity and allowed players to do what they desperately wanted to do. Many administrators and coaches believe it was worth it.
“I think a lot of people put a lot of time and effort throughout the country, throughout the NCAA, throughout every conference to try to create an atmosphere and environment which gave the players an opportunity to compete, the fans something to root for and look forward to, and I think that’s a real positive thing,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said last week. “I would say under the circumstances that we’re pleased with the way this season has gone and the number of games we’ve been able to play, the players having the opportunity to compete and now to culminate it with a playoff and a championship game.”
But the full story of what happened in 2020 cannot be told without acknowledging how frustrating and emotionally draining it was to pull it off. For every program that was able to play a season, every day was like building an airplane and flying it at the same time.
That meant a lot of unique things we could have never imagined before this season — players meeting with coaches by Zoom, games being scheduled at the last minute, contact tracing shutting down entire position groups — but also hundreds of other moments that bordered on surreal.
Jared Benko, the athletics director at Georgia Southern, remembers the days before the Sept. 12 opener against Campbell College when he was with his staff marking off seats and hanging signs in the stadium to reconfigure it for social distancing for a capacity of 6,250.
“The whole planning process of that took a good week, and it was all hands on deck,” he said. “We had 50-plus people out there, coaches in other sports who have nothing to do with football putting down seating vinyl and reading a map saying, ‘Hey, this one is open.’ It was like trying to play ‘Tetris.’ But that Friday night before the game, I was just sitting there in the upper deck looking over the field and you can see the fruits of that labor. There was a lot of sense of pride in that.”
But for pretty much every program, success or failure of those efforts came down to one thing: What the tests said. They often brought bad news.
NEXT: ‘I worried sick’