In a moment of great magnitude for college football, the SEC decided to join the Big Ten and Pac-12 in having a 10-game conference-only schedule. The news broke on Thursday afternoon, as our friends at Auburn Tigers Wire noted.
In the tweet below, notice the date at the bottom:
BREAKING: #SEC presidents have adopted a plan to play a 10-game, conference-only schedule this fall, sources told @SINow.
League approved kickoff date is Sept. 26. Particulars on the schedule (the two additional games & locations) are unclear for now.
SEC title game Dec. 19.
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) July 30, 2020
The especially big detail in this news — at least for residents of Los Angeles — is the revelation that the SEC Championship Game, if played, will be on Saturday, Dec. 19.
People in the West and throughout the Pac-12 need to realize this: With the Rose Bowl being one of the two College Football Playoff semifinals this season, the SEC’s Dec. 19 date for its title game means that the Rose Bowl — the most sacred of college football traditions — will not be played on January 1 of 2021.
There will not be a 2:10 p.m. local time kickoff on New Year’s Day in the Arroyo Seco.
It is sad, it is unfortunate, but after the Tournament of Roses Parade was canceled, this is not surprising at all.
We obviously have to face the possibility that there won’t be a full college football season in the first place, meaning that we might not get to the College Football Playoff or the bowl season, but it is still momentous — in a bad way — that the Rose Bowl will not be played on New Year’s Day. It will make January 1, normally a day of happiness and hope, that much bleaker, barring the discovery of a vaccine or something else of similar enormity which can rescue us from the misery of 2020.
This is all a reminder of how little normalcy we actually have, and that normalcy simply won’t be a part of our lives for several more months. Whether we play college football or not in 2020, I think we can all agree that if we get a relatively normal college football season in 2021, and if sports are relatively “back to normal” by Labor Day of 2021, it will be a reasonably good scenario.
The true nightmare is if 2021 is disrupted the way 2020 has been, with the moving of the Rose Bowl off the January 1 date being a primary example of how awful everything is in college sports.