The College Football Playoff admits it has no backup plan

It really is that bad.

Even by 2020’s absurd standards of ridiculousness, this is hard to comprehend: College football’s leaders and power brokers have spent the past several months adjusting, changing, revising, reshaping, reconsidering the various aspects of a possible 2020 season.

Different schedules. Different lengths of the season. Different compositions of conference games versus nonconference games. Different start dates for training camp and the regular season. Different dates for conference championship games. Different allotments of idle weeks for teams. These changes weren’t desired — they were forced upon the sport — but they had to be made on a general level. We could argue about the merits of specific details, sure, but more broadly, schedules did have to be adjusted. On this point, no one can mount a credible counterargument.

Yet, in the face of all these adjustments, all these changes, all these attempts to provide contingency plans and backups and Plan Cs and alternative options, the College Football Playoff simply stood pat.

Yes, the College Football Playoff did adjust the date of its selection show to Dec. 20, but that’s only because the final game of the season — the SEC Championship Game (maybe other conference title games as well, if we ever get to that point) — is scheduled for Dec. 19. The selection show could not have been any earlier than Dec. 19, so of course that had to change. The decision had already been made for the playoff.

On nearly every decision the playoff had to make on its own, it refused to change, except for a cosmetic detail about changing the day when teams arrive before the national championship game.

You can read the College Football Playoff’s press release after it made the truly stunning decision to not change the dates for its semifinal or championship games on Wednesday. While the rest of college football has made obvious and necessary adjustments, the playoff just stood there. It is as though the playoff has no idea what to do about any of this.

Let’s briefly play along with a hypothetical and assume the playoff doesn’t currently know what to do.

If that’s the case, why not simply admit it?

Let’s keep this in mind: If we somehow get to the playoff this season (which would feel like a miracle under the present circumstances), there won’t be capacity crowds — or anything above a 50-percent-capacity crowd — at these games. We almost surely won’t have a vaccine which is proven to be safe and can be widely distributed to the public by the end of December. That will necessarily limit the presence of fans in the stands.

So, if ticket sales and the optics of playing games in packed stadiums with roaring, excited crowds cannot be part of this season’s playoff, why is there such a need to commit to game dates in advance? It’s not as though the Superdome (Sugar Bowl semifinal) or the Rose Bowl stadium (the other playoff semifinal), or Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium (the championship game) are booking lots of events. NO! Sports venues are going quiet due to the pandemic. This isn’t a normal situation, as we keep saying here at Trojans Wire.

If the playoff doesn’t know what to do, there’s no penalty or problem in admitting it publicly! It’s August 5! The SEC and Pac-12 won’t (try to) start their seasons until Sept. 26. There’s plenty of time!

Why commit so early if unsure of what to do?

Let’s move on and forget the hypothetical mentioned above. Let’s say the playoff DOES know what it wants to do, that it DOES want to preserve New Year’s Day for its semifinal games.

Even if it wanted to do that (and I’m sure it does), shouldn’t a press release have contained all of the following details:

  1. COVID-19 guidelines for testing, tracing, isolation, and quarantine at the semifinal and championship bowl games.
  2. Protocols and procedures connected to the guidelines, including the conferences/schools or other entities responsible for supervising the process.
  3. Alternate game dates if certain COVID-19 test results or situations emerge which make the original dates impossible to maintain.
  4. Alternate game sites if it becomes necessary to move the Rose and Sugar Bowls to campus sites or other locations (such as Tulane’s new on-campus facility for an outdoor Sugar Bowl).

The College Football Playoff provided NONE of those details, which would seem like such an obvious thing to do.

Speaking of obvious things to do (or not do), the playoff isn’t even going to do the obvious thing in terms of its meetings this season:

You mean ranking teams can’t be done over Zoom?

You mean that in a situation where universities are looking at significant revenue shortfalls, the playoff committee is still going to travel to a meeting location and basically waste money?

You mean that people who don’t have to meet in person during a pandemic will insist on meeting anyway?

The College Football Playoff is essentially standing in the middle of constant, overwhelming change and saying, “We don’t want to change anything more than we absolutely have to. We have no backup plans. We have nothing to offer college football in general or the athletes who will be asked to play in our three big games at the end of the season.”

Even by 2020’s standards — even by America’s very low standard of coronavirus pandemic responsiveness — this is jarring.

The College Football Playoff is too lazy to provide any alternatives or safety guidelines in a pandemic. It is hard to process.