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If there’s a question that gets asked more than any other by college football fans in the past few months it’s ‘will there be a football season in 2020?’
For the Locked On Wolverines Podcast, we do a listener mailbag every Thursday, and every Wednesday when we do an open call for questions on Twitter, at least one of them is that exact question.
But the thing is: no one knows at this juncture. There’s the pessimistic view that it’s destined to be canceled, an optimistic view that it will go on as planned and something in the middle where it will happen but look radically different. Regardless of your view, even those at the top have no idea. They’re planning on a season and making contingencies.
Which is why we saw the Big Ten Conference be the first to take the bold step of announcing a conference-only schedule, thus eliminating some marquee matchups that were set to happen out of conference.
While it’s disappointing to see Michigan at Washington, Ohio State at Oregon and Miami (FL) at MSU canceled, to some, it indicated that there’s a seriousness to get a season done. Wolverines wide receiver Ronnie Bell indicated just that in a conversation with Jon Jansen on the In the Trenches podcast on Friday, relaying his reaction to the news last month that the conference was at least working to find a way to see football take place this fall.
“I was just excited because that’s just kinda like somebody’s trying to make it like we play,” Bell said. “Before that, it was like we wasn’t gonna be playing. But once we heard that – at least somebody’s making an attempt at trying to get us to play.”
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But, that excitement is certainly tempered — because as said, no one knows anything. That can come with some ups-and-downs if you’re in a position such as Bell.
Bell says he took a little longer before he left Ann Arbor to go back to his native Missouri, and once he made it home, he figured he’d only be there a week. A week turned into months as the coronavirus pandemic continued to flourish throughout the country.
Like the rest of his teammates, he reported to campus in mid-June, but the uncertainty lingered — and continues to. But, that’s not something he can dwell on, he says, because while he and the team are training for a currently un-promised season, they’re all well aware that whether a season happens or not is out of their realm of control.
But that doesn’t make any of this any easier.
“Emotionally, it’s been crazy,” Bell said. “At the beginning, we all go home and nobody really knows what’s going on. And me personally, when I went home, I’m thinking I’m about to be home for no more than five days and I’m gonna be right back. I didn’t think anything of it. And then, things started to get real serious. And then, before I knew it, I was home for a whole month. And it’s like, ‘Yo! When are we going back? When are we going back?’ The pandemic – it was getting worse around that time, it wasn’t good at all. And then it got kinda of nervous, like, ‘Are we gonna play?’
“But now, you go from thinking you’re not gonna play to coming up to school, now you’re excited to be back to school with all your teammates, you’re working out, you guys are going hard. Around that time, when we started to work out – we’ve been working out maybe like eight weeks or something like that – and maybe two weeks in, I can’t remember what happened – teams in the Big Ten started canceling summer workouts. So when teams started doing that, it was like, ‘Dang, we’re not gonna play.’ And then, like a week later, they announced the Big Ten-only schedule. And it was like, snap! We might play, they’re just trying to make it the Big Ten. So now you’re excited about that and now you’re just holding your breath because I think they were supposed to announce confirming a season not too long ago – a couple days ago. And then they didn’t. I don’t know. Emotionally, it’s all over the place.
“You gotta try to not get wrapped up in the decision-making of if there’s gonna be a season or not because you can only control what you can control. And if you’re gonna worry about things you can’t control you’ll go crazy.”
For now, Bell is taking comfort in the positives. He’s back in Ann Arbor, he’s practicing with the team (organized workouts began July 24) and now that he’s a junior, he’s no longer living in the dorms.
At the moment, while we know very little, whatever solace one can get — especially someone in his position, whose livelihood depends on football happening — it’s the best that he can do.
“I (wasn’t) tired of being home – I love being home. But I was just excited because I’m finally in my own apartment and stuff now. It was just an exciting thing to be able to come back here and be in my own apartment, in my own space.”