[jwplayer BJytlQVf-XNcErKyb]
It looks like the day we’ve all been dreading is potentially here.
A day after the Mid-American Conference (MAC) announced it was postponing football and fall sports to the spring, according to a report from Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger and Pat Forde, it looks like the Power Five is set to follow suit. It appears that the Big Ten will be the first domino to fall in the Power Five (which is constituted by the Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big 12 and PAC-12), coming on the heels of another report that first-year commissioner Kevin Warren prefers a spring season for football.
High-level conference meetings are being planned for this week across the college football landscape with the expected resolution of postponing fall sports until 2021, multiple sources have told Sports Illustrated.
“It’s gotten to a critical stage,” one conference commissioner told Sports Illustrated Sunday, after a conference call with colleagues. “I think all of us will be meeting with our boards in the coming days. We have work to do that is no fun.”
Dominoes started falling in earnest Saturday when the Mid-American Conference postponed fall sports. The Big Ten followed with an announcement that it was pausing its scheduled progression to full-pads football practices. A well-placed source told SI Saturday, “I think by the end of the week the fall sports will be postponed in all conferences.”
Even that timetable might be accelerated. Sources told SI on Sunday that the Big Ten is moving toward a decision to cancel the 2020 fall season, while engaging other Power 5 conferences on a uniform decision to be announced later this week. Group of 5 league representatives simultaneously were conferring to align their own timelines, a source said.
Given the coronavirus pandemic, it did seem like it would be a matter of time, but the question remains: what changed between last week and this week?
On Wednesday, the Big Ten announced updated protocols to go along with a new schedule, and teams were permitted to start fall camp — which Michigan did on Aug. 7. At the moment, we’ve seen no uptick in cases resulting from camp, though some schools had seen some increases in COVID-19 cases at the outset and in the middle of voluntary workouts. Rutgers, Michigan State, Ohio State and Indiana all have seen some sort of pause at one time or another since returning student-athletes to campus. Michigan has paused some sports, but not football. U-M has a total number of 35 positives among students and staff according to the weekly Friday afternoon release — with none of the six new student-athlete cases coming from football, according to Jim Harbaugh on the In the Trenches podcast released this week.
USA TODAY Sports SMG’s own Pete Fiutak of College Football News posed these interesting questions in regards to the changes.
How much – if any – of the Power 5 college football doom-and-gloom today was simply about squashing the player demands?
Threaten to cancel fall football, sit back and watch the players who want to play undermine the boycott cause while the public panics about losing a season. https://t.co/4mJMzz4Wrr
— Pete Fiutak (@PeteFiutak) August 9, 2020
Big Ten, what EXACTLY changed from less than a week ago – when you released a full season schedule with built-in make-up dates – to now? (And don’t say “the MAC,” or I’m hanging up.)
— Pete Fiutak (@PeteFiutak) August 9, 2020
And more recently, he chimed in with this — in which we’re in total agreement.
You had 4 MONTHS, college football.
You didn’t have a coordinated plan. You didn’t have a set idea. You didn’t get creative. You didn’t see that the bubble actually works, and you didn’t try utilizing a form of that on a college-by-college basis.
You had 4 months.
— Pete Fiutak (@PeteFiutak) August 9, 2020
Now we wait for the official word. Will the season be canceled outright or postponed? If it is postponed to spring, how will that affect those draft-eligible players who had intended to use the season to secure their place in the NFL next season?
At the moment, we have more questions than answers. But there’s one answer that we have which we’ve long been dreading: it looks like there will be no football in Ann Arbor this fall.