The COVID-19 pandemic has tossed a giant wrench into the entire world. Across Earth countries have been shuttering their doors and battening down the hatches to combat the deadly virus. With that, sports has fallen by the wayside in a big way, including here in America. Many fans, coaches, administrators, and analysts are now wondering whether the fall sports schedule could be in jeopardy. ESPN’s top college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit made headlines last week when he said he’d be “shocked” if there was a college football season. At this point it seems futile to predict anything, with how quickly numbers change relative to people infected, mortality rate, the economy, etc. But if college football is to return in any form this fall, time is of the essence. So that begs the question, what might a timeline look like for a plausible return? It will require an extended period of time in which the athletes are safely able to be on campus in larger groups, preferably before the end of summer.
Keep in mind as you read on, none of this is any sort of prediction, and–as has been said a billion times in the last month–this is a very fluid situation.
Today Michigan State announced that the first session of their summer classes would be held entirely online, as well as classes that run the full summer. For informational purposes, summer classes at Michigan State fall into two categories. Full summer classes are similar to fall and winter semester classes in that a student takes X amount of hours of schooling over an extended period of time. There are also shorter session classes. In the shorter session a student goes to classes for longer periods of time over a shorter time frame. Essentially a full semester class gets crammed into a six-week block. There are two summer sessions at Michigan State. The first starts May 11 and ends June 25. The second starts June 29 and ends August 13.
Why does this matter?
Well, football players need to be on campus, practicing and training, in order for there to be a season. It’s impossible for an all clear to be given in the middle of August and for games to kick off two weeks later.
The Athletic’s Audrey Snyder spoke with Penn State Athletic Director Sandy Barbour about how much timing football players would need before games can be played. Barbour surmised that the athletes would need about two months.
AD Sandy Barbour said after talking with sports science folks, etc. they feel 60 days would be "about right" in terms of how long they'd need to have football players on campus to train before having a season.
— Audrey Snyder (@audsnyder4) April 2, 2020
This is obviously not a hard and fast rule. Would 50 days suffice? Probably. The fact of the matter is, there needs to be an extended period of all clear.
Let’s circle back to Michigan State’s academic calendar. With summer session one being entirely online, it’s fair to assume football players won’t be allowed back on campus to train in that time period. Could they if things improve drastically with COVID-19? Sure. I suppose there is a timeline in which two months from now athletes are allowed to begin training in groups on college campuses at the beginning of June. In the more likely scenario that athletes aren’t summoned back to campus prior to that, that brings us to June 25, when summer session one ends.
Summer session two begins just four days later on June 29. If that session were to be fully online as well, that would seemingly mean we are headed for a delay in college football. This is when the 60 days Barbour alludes to come into play, because 60 days from June 29 is August 28. The very first college football games in the 2020 season are scheduled for August 29. Michigan State starts its season on September 5–the day the majority of college football teams play their first games. That is a very tidy timeline and probably represents something close to a best-case scenario. However that doesn’t leave much time for error. Students would have to be welcomed back to campus for the start of the second summer session at the end of June. Whether that is even a remotely realistic scenario will be determined by health experts across the country over the next two months.
Now, there aren’t any hard and fast rules when it comes to any of this. Uncharted territory doesn’t begin to come close to describing where college sports are at the moment. Even if regular students aren’t permitted to be on campus, could an exemption be made for college athletes in revenue sports, understanding their importance to the fiscal maintenance of the university? Possibly, but that would require extensive safety measures and testing as a start. Is that worth the liability of players or coaches getting sick or dying in the name of having a football season? Obviously not, but how likely is it that a player or coach will get sick? How much can prevention keep them from getting sick? Is there a treatment for the disease by the summer? Does the summer heat slow the spread of the disease? These are all theoretical questions that are going to have to be answered if there’s any shot of football returning this fall.
Yahoo! Sports’ Pete Thamel spoke with college athletic directors about this very issue. Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich told him,“With school not in session, I don’t believe it is practical or proper to have intercollegiate athletics.”
It would be best if society and its pillars were able to just press pause on the world in order to focus fully on combatting COVID-19, but that’s just not how the world works, especially the world of college athletics. Athletic departments are already dealing with budget issues due to the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament. Non-revenue programs have been put on hold, coaches and administrators have taken reductions in salaries or lost jobs altogether. Imagine the hit college athletic departments will take without football bringing in tens of millions (and in some cases more than $100 million) of dollars in revenue. Administrators will be doing whatever they can to get in a college football season. Full stop.
Add in that millions of us ordinary folks are going to be absolutely dying for college football to return and bring us any sense of normalcy. There will be a lot of pressure to get a season in.
As it sites right now, the next domino to fall–so to speak–is the start of summer session two. Does Michigan State allow students back on campus to begin classes on June 29? If they do, you can bet football players are going to be among the groups heading back to campus, with an extended fall camp leading up to kickoff by the end of August, just in time to save us all from and endless summer of boredom. But if that doesn’t happen, and Michigan State and other schools close their doors for the entire summer and hint towards reopening to start in the fall, then college football could be in major trouble.
There are many factors at play (fluid situation!!) and with new COVID-19 information changing opinions and strategies on a daily basis, who the hell really knows where we will be in two days let alone two months? But if college football is to be played on time this season, the athletes need to be cleared to return to campus for an extended period of time. Even though kickoff is not for five months, college football is in a race against time.
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