Let’s stop for a moment and realize that while the Power Five conferences are in the process of formulating their adjusted schedules for the 2020 college football season, those plans might not ever get off the ground.
No, I am not making a prediction or even hinting at one. It is simply a fact of life that the coronavirus is driving this bus more than we are. We can have plans, but events can and do override plans. If there’s a huge team-wide outbreak or if any athlete or coach gets severely ill, this ends, and we wait for a vaccine. That is part of the new reality we live in, so it’s worth repeating (I know this might get tired, but it’s necessary to be repetitive in a crisis such as this) that today’s plans could be worth nothing tomorrow.
Let’s say, however, that events don’t crush college football’s plans to have a 2020 season. These schedules and adjustments are leading in all sorts of directions. They haven’t been formally approved yet by school presidents and/or chancellors in the respective conferences, but they are likely to emerge in a form similar to what has been reported the past week.
The Big Ten and Pac-12 are sitting on one side of the room, with a 10-game conference-only game schedule.
The ACC is likely to adopt a plan with one nonconference game, and a schedule length which will be different from the Big Ten and Pac-12. A nine-game plan and an 11-game plan have risen to the top of the ACC’s wish list.
The Big 12 — with Oklahoma and Kansas filling Aug. 29 dates on their schedule, and with TCU trying to do the same — is intent on playing a full 12 games.
No word yet from the SEC.
The Power Five conferences — with the exception of the Big Ten and Pac-12 — are moving at different speeds, pursuing different plans with different goals and start dates for the season. This is a portrait of self-interest, as opposed to communally shared goals. This is a process in which conferences aren’t working together so much as working to control their own situations. Conferences would rather — for the most part — pursue their own paths rather than coordinate COVID-19 responses among each other, which would have enabled more games (not fewer) to be played.
One question: What were these power conferences doing from April through June if it wasn’t to learn how to coordinate COVID-19 testing, tracing, and quarantine responses? These are academic institutions with research capacities and a not-insignificant amount of resources. The idea that coordinating tracing and testing practices between conferences was a daunting logistical hurdle too great to be managed is — to me, at least — an admission of failure. Self-interested plans are to a degree a product of that failure.
This merely follows what we have seen in America since the pandemic hit.
States and localities aren’t on the same page, for the most part. States and the federal government aren’t working well together. States and cities in many cases aren’t working well together. Sure, the Republican-Democrat divide is a significant political complication, but it nevertheless remains that college sports haven’t been able to demonstrate a unified front in their own right.
An especially valid and salient point to make here is that if states aren’t supporting their universities and furnishing them with added resources, the schools can only do so much. Yet, one can take that point and turn it around: Why were presidents of universities unable to lean on governors and/or the federal government to get the resources needed to provide a more robust response to COVID-19?
Whether it’s political skill, business acumen, or medical mobilization, it is hard to come away impressed by what university leaders and power brokers have (not) done in response to the coronavirus. Have they lived under immense constraints and complications? Yes. That has been acknowledged. Yet, the larger reality still reflects an underwhelming response which has us in a position where playing college football is a profound point of uncertainty.
Major universities have followed America’s lead… and that obviously isn’t a good thing, given the way the country’s leadership has responded to this pandemic.