Real spring football

In light of my last post, this is an awkward question, perhaps, but how many of you will watch FCS football this spring?

In a normal school year, members of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team would have just returned to campus to begin the spring term, with a little time to rest up after a fall semester full of football games and a renewed focus on the winter workouts coming up.

But as everyone knows, 2020 wasn’t a normal year. And these aren’t normal times. So when the Mocs returned over the weekend, they did so in anticipation of two weeks of winter workouts that will lead up to official practices — not those of the “spring” variety — starting in early February. It’s all in preparation for a spring semester season in the Football Championship Subdivision, with the Southern Conference playing an eight-game schedule.

The Mocs — who played one game in 2020, a 13-10 loss at Football Bowl Subdivision member Western Kentucky on Oct. 24 — will kick off their league slate with a home game against Virginia Military Institute on Feb. 20. The FCS playoffs will run from mid-April to mid-May, with the field limited to 16 teams (11 league champions and five at-large selections) instead of 24 for this edition.

It’s kind of interesting that they’re using the pandemic to shrink the size of the postseason.