The fate of FBS college football in the fall could be greatly impacted by the NCAA Board of Governors tomorrow.
According to CBS Sports, the board is scheduled to consider voting on whether to cancel fall championships tomorrow.
Here are details:
On Friday, the NCAA Board of Governors is scheduled to consider voting on whether to cancel fall championships. One source told CBS Sports that is the only agenda item for the NCAA’s highest governing body.
In essence, Friday could become that go/no go moment for the college football season.
While the vote — in the moment — would have no direct or immediate impact on the FBS, the implications of such a decision are significant, layered, complicated and maybe tragic.
While the season probably isn’t going to go away Friday, it soon could. Through that board — mostly presidents and chancellors from all NCAA divisions — the association has more leverage than ever over major-college football, a sport of which it has largely lost oversight.
The FBS — particularly the Power Five conferences — has mostly been autonomous from the NCAA for years. The NCAA doesn’t stage an FBS championship. That is controlled by the 130 teams, their conferences, their commissioners, ESPN and the College Football Playoff.
With Friday’s vote, the board could win back some of that lost turf while backing the FBS football into a corner.
That corner? Well, how would it look if the NCAA isn’t staging fall championships in 22 sports but those 130 FBS programs decided to soldier onward, basically on their own?
Answer: not good.
It’s tremendously bad optics, for starters. Several conferences and teams in lower divisions have already decided not to play at sports at all in the fall.
Meanwhile, for months, the Power Five and the rest of FBS have been balancing the “need” to play — and earn the revenue that comes from those games — with the wisdom of playing at all amid the coronavirus pandemic.
