According to a high-ranking college official, it’s all but a foregone conclusion that there will be no football in the fall due to coronavirus.
Here’s an excerpt from Yahoo! Sports:
“Right now, I don’t see a path in the current environment to how we play,” said a Power Five athletic director. “I’m confident we’ll get back to what we all think of as normal, but it may be a year before that happens.”
Here’s the cruel truth about how college football leaders approached football this fall: The entirety of their plan to return was based on hope. Hope that the COVID-19 would go away. Hope that college campuses wouldn’t be a petri dish for the virus. Hope that they could figure out a way to play a contact sport in a time of mandatory social distancing. Hope for a vaccine to keep players healthy and seats full.
A strategy of hope isn’t much of a strategy, and a half-dozen coaches and officials told Yahoo Sports this weekend that hope is being vanquished. It’s all over in the minds of many coaches and athletic directors, as the sport will keep pushing back to buy time until the inevitable happens.
“Ultimately, no one is playing football in the fall,” said a high-ranking college official. “It’s just a matter of how it unfolds. As soon one of the ‘autonomy five’ or Power Five conferences makes a decision, that’s going to end it.”
With more than 70,000 positive coronavirus tests in the United States setting a one-day record this weekend, outbreaks on college campuses all over the country and surges in cases in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the path to play college football safely is simply untenable.
College football remains a four-touchdown underdog, thanks to individual campuses, academic requirements and the inability to take 13,000 FBS players and put them in a bubble. If the NBA’s ability to play in a bubble that reportedly costs $150 million is being regarded as tenuous, the chances of college football being played in some recognizable form in the fall are similar to attempting to keep a candle lit while walking 10 miles in a hurricane.
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