Let me start by throwing a few quotes at you:
- “Here’s a consensus going around for the major conferences if things progress at a predictable curve,” Patrick said on Monday, per a source. “We’re going to have 10 games with a later start. Nine conference games and regional conference games take precedence. You won’t have any FCS games (against Power 5 teams) with players returning mid-June or early-July … The conference that is struggling is the Pac-12. California is a concern … Money will be a concern (for all of college football) and attendance will be limited.”
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Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott ($$) oversees a conference spanning six states, four of which remain shut down.
“There’s a spirit of cooperation when it comes to college football in particular, a strong bias toward making sure we do this together,” Scott said. “We’re all members of the College Football Playoff, and if we’re going to have a Playoff at the end of the season, we need to have uniformity on how we have a season.”
- “Having said that, I think we all recognize there’s a significant chance that [a common start to the college football season] may not be possible,” Swarbrick said, “that either because states or individual colleges and universities take different approaches, you can’t produce a season where all members are participating in Division I football in the same way.”
States are proceeding differently, which means conferences will be forced to proceed differently. Money will be a concern. (Duh.) Not being able to start the season uniformly will have an impact on the CFP.
How do conference commissioners resolve those conflicting issues? I have no idea and at the moment, I doubt they do, either.
Oh, yeah, toss in one more thing:
If the decision is made to shorten the season because of the coronavirus pandemic, Notre Dame would lose 10 of its 12 scheduled opponents for this season because of its independent status for football.
And that’s before you even get to whether they’ll play in front of fans or not… more likely the latter, at least to start.
“Decisions about fans (attending) is really going to be made by public health officials,” Scott said. “Decisions whether to play or not play are going to be made by universities, conferences and the NCAA. Those are two very different types of decisions.”
You get one guess as to why they’re different. And, no, I do not digress. Especially when you read a quote like this:
“The virus is going to be around for a while, so we’re going to have to learn how to live with it, and that’s especially true for athletics,” Bowlsby said. “We’re going to have to learn coping mechanisms. It’s not that it’s patently unsafe, it’s, are you confident you have the testing and best practices in place to ensure a virus-free environment? There’s always going to be some risk.”
How cool is that? I spend a chunk of change to buy football tickets, and I get a health risk thrown in at no additional charge! Thanks, Bob.
They’re going to play a regular season, in other words. They can’t afford not to. The big issue they’ve got to work out is how to salvage the postseason, because they can’t afford not to have a playoff, either. We’re about to find out if these guys are really as smart as they think they are.