In a meeting on Friday, the NCAA Board of Governors faced a choice: Vote on how to handle the NCAA’s fall sports — encompassing FCS college football and the other non-football sports — or delay the vote.
The board made its decision: Wait to make a decision. The “delay” side won.
Source: The NCAA Board of Governors decided today to not make a decision on fall championship. They pushed the decision down the road, which is what Power Five ADs and the Football Oversight Committee wanted.
— Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) July 24, 2020
The politics of this move are not that hard to understand: If the NCAA had chosen to shut down all of its fall sports, the FBS and the College Football Playoff would have been left on an island.
This doesn’t necessarily mean football would have been dead for the fall, but the politics of playing FBS football — while FCS football and the other fall sports would have been postponed — would have been more complicated.
A decision to shut down fall sports wouldn’t have killed FBS football, but it certainly would have moved the needle in the wrong direction. This is a political win for the Power Five conferences and any school which has been pushing hard for a delay.
This delay was wanted for obvious reasons: Much as the Pac-12 is starting its season — reportedly — on Sept. 19 to buy a few extra weeks to wait out COVID-19 and hope the numbers improve, college football also wants a few extra weeks to do the same thing. If, by early August, COVID-19 numbers start to fall and situations become a lot more manageable, the Power Five conferences will have (comparatively) legitimate reason to go forward with football. Teams can move from workouts into full-on training camp and crank up their activities in preparation for the season.
Delaying the vote on NCAA fall sports is all about buying time. One thing it does is that it gives the Group of Five conferences more of a chance to think about their adjusted schedules, which are being eroded by the Power Five conferences reducing their amounts of nonconference games.
Wait until the end of the first week of August to see if the college football season will start.