Editor’s note: This article was originally published by USA TODAY Sports and has been republished in its entirety below.
At some point late Monday night just outside of Miami, confetti guns will go off and a trophy will be handed to either Alabama or Ohio State and the entire college football industry will collectively exhale.
For 10 straight months, administrators at every school and conference in the Football Bowl Subdivision have worked through innumerable problems and uncertainties to get to the conclusion of a 2020 season that, at various points, nobody was sure would happen. But as soon as this season ends, college football officials will have to turn their sights to a new piece of the COVID-19 puzzle: What is the 2021 season going to look like?
“We know we’re still in the middle of trying to work through a pandemic,” Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione said. “The football season may be over, but the pandemic isn’t.”
Beyond the existential challenges college sports will have to navigate in 2021 brought on by the name, image and likeness legislation moving through the NCAA and Congress and liberalized transfer rules for athletes, the next several months for college football will be consumed by more elemental issues including how long it will be necessary to continue strict COVID-19 protocols, the feasibility of spring practice, vaccinating players and whether the fall of 2021 will truly be a return to normal.
“I’m an eternal optimist so we’re about to roll out our new season ticket structure and we’re preparing to have as normal of a fall as we can,” said Boston College athletics director Pat Kraft. “That’s the only thing you can do. You hope the vaccine (is widely available) and everything is better. But we know this isn’t over.”
That means as football players whose seasons ended trickle back to campuses in the coming weeks for offseason conditioning, they will return to a similar environment they’ve been operating in for the last several months: Lots of testing, mask wearing and social distancing, plus quarantining for players who get contact traced to a positive test. The question nobody can really answer is whether that will last well into the spring, continue through the summer or perhaps carry into the fall season.
“We have at least as difficult a six months ahead as what we just experienced,” Tulane athletics director Troy Dannen said. “When we talked about playing our bowl game, part of the thought of having two more weeks of practice is that all bets are off right now as far as what spring football looks like. It will be three tests a week and shutting down groups, shutting down teams (for contact tracing). It’s going to look like the fall without games.”
And as pretty much every college coach has said either publicly or probably privately, nobody wants to go through that again.