The biggest story in collegiate athletics right now is the building drama surrounding the 2020 college football season. Leaders and decision makers in college sports will soon have to determine if the season can start on time… or at all. Given that a six-week period is generally accepted as the necessary timetable for preseason preparations at FBS schools, a decision will have to be made in the next 11 to 18 days on whether the season can (or will) begin as scheduled. That isn’t the same thing as deciding whether the season will happen, but it is the first in a series of decisions the sport will have to make before too long.
Football obviously takes first place among all sports, since its revenues have the biggest effect on school budgets. The sport is rightly viewed as the most important big-picture story connected to collegiate athletics’ attempt to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.
We can’t, however, forget about college basketball, which has its own complications and its own set of challenges which must be addressed by the leaders of college sports.
Some news emerged in college basketball on Monday: Leaders are trying to wrestle with possible alternative arrangements for the coming season.
More: NCAA leaders have had preliminary discussions on the men’s basketball season actually beginning early this fall with a potential winter break. Growing number of campuses pausing in November is prompting a more serious examination of changing the calendar in hoops as well.
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanDFischer) July 6, 2020
The main thrust of this idea is obvious enough, even though the actual words “Thanksgiving” and “Christmas” weren’t specifically mentioned.
A winter break would almost surely mean that college basketball would try to play games in October, before the weather gets especially cold and flu season arrives. The sport would take a break before Thanksgiving. Athletes and their families would be able to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day together. This makes good sense on every possible level.
First, families ought to be together at important holidays if they can be. In a pandemic, increasing family togetherness should be encouraged even more. Logistically, this also makes sense because many (possibly most) universities won’t have on-campus instruction in November. It would be foolish to ask athletes to leave home, travel in cold weather near flu season, and then return home, especially without a vaccine for COVID-19. The virus could spread through households.
Duck in a few nonconference games in October so that schools receive revenue. Get the country through the winter of 2021 — hopefully, the last American winter without a coronavirus vaccine — and then see in late March if a season can be resumed in April and May.
The powers that be in college football might consider a spring resumption to the season, so it could be that college basketball might wait until June to play. It would be weird. It would be disjointed. It would be nowhere close to normal.
That’s the world we live in right now. Nothing is normal, and as I keep saying in my columns on COVID-19 and college sports, none of us should expect normalcy anytime soon. The most reasonable expectation of anything resembling “normalcy” should be in September of 2021, when we can hopefully have a relatively recognizable football season, with basketball to follow. Anything through June of 2021 is not going to be normal in most (if not all) of the ways we commonly recognize in college sports.
The obvious postscript to this story: Will this rearrangement of the college basketball schedule lead to a permanent revision of the college sports calendar? That’s a good question… and we’ll deal with it in a separate column at an appropriate time.