About an hour after the Big Ten Conference voted to postpone the Fall 2020 college football season, the Pac 12 is reported to have followed suit.
While I strongly disagree with the Big Ten’s decision, and with the Pac 12’s as well, the fact that they’re still in this together does give options for college football fans.
No one knows what the winter will bring. We have no idea if it will be safe enough to play football this fall and winter. It’s definitely possible that it won’t be, though the decision to cancel now is clearly premature. Either way, with two major conferences pushing off football, we can perhaps get a coordinated semi-season in the late winter/early spring. (And, since the MAC and Mountain West have both postponed as well, we could possibly even see some nonconference games.)
The Big Ten and Pac 12 have never been shy about going things alone when the rest of college football was doing something else. The Rose Bowl never joined the original Bowl Alliance, and was the last and strongest holdout before the formation of the BCS. The game, while also contractually connected to the Playoff now, is very much connected to the Big Ten and Pac 12.
We don’t know what the SEC, Big 12, and ACC will do. Maybe they’ll push off their seasons, or maybe they’ll play in full. Maybe they’ll have to start and stop. What those conferences do remains to be seen. And it will certainly be weird to see a fall college football season with those conferences, followed by a spring one with the Big Ten and Pac 12.
But that could very well be what we get. It would not be an entirely bad outcome for college football fans, though the logistics of playing a spring season and then playing again in Fall 2021 have to be dealt with. Still, if the Big Ten and Pac 12 can manage to coordinate a season starting in January, February, or March, we can definitely expect that the conferences will look for a way to cap it off with a game in Pasadena.
All in all, that would not be the worst-case scenario in a sports world that seems to have been nothing but worst-case scenarios for quite a while now.