It’s remarkable how quickly the winds can change in college football. When the Big Ten announced that it was postponing its fall season with the Pac-12 quickly following suit, it looked like there would be no season. The Big 12 decided to follow the ACC and SEC in waiting things out, as did some of the Group of 5 conferences, so we didn’t lose everything in early August.
Now in mid-September, the Big Ten did what commissioner Kevin Warren said wouldn’t happen and reevaluated its decision. The B1G is full-go for late October, and the Pac-12 subsequently has begun lobbying the states of California and Oregon for the permission necessary to make its season happen in the fall. The Mountain West began looking at a return as well, which is forcing the MAC to reconsider. Since the leagues that merely delayed are getting something of a season going, the breeze started blowing in the direction of everyone playing.
I say “something of a season” because it’s not all gone off without a hitch. The next week without a game postponed or canceled due to COVID-19-related reasons will be the first.
In the first week of FBS games, two of the 11 matchups (18.1%) didn’t happen. Last weekend, it was four of 24 (16.7%) that fell away. This week, five of 26 (19.2%) bombed out, though Baylor and Houston scrambled last weekend to put a game together on what was supposed to be the Bears’ off week. FBS as a whole is running at a rate of about one out of six scheduled games not happening.
So far, most of the schedule holes have come from non-power conferences. Rice and FIU chose to delay the start of their seasons. Arkansas State, BYU, Charlotte, East Carolina, Louisiana Tech, and Tulsa have had to postpone or cancel at least one game. Temple moved its September 26th game with Navy back a couple weeks because Philadelphia isn’t allowing gatherings of more than 50, including college football practices.
TCU is the only Big 12 program to have to put a game on ice. That said, Oklahoma revealed after its game last weekend that it almost didn’t have enough players available to play. Kansas had almost 40 players not dress for various reasons in its loss to Coastal Carolina, but it seems unlikely that so many guys would’ve all sat for violations of team rules or whatever. In the ACC, the Virginia schools mutually agreed to postpone their matchup that was supposed to be tomorrow because of COVID issues at VT.
The inverse of the statement above about the rate of game attrition is that five out of six games are actually happening. Is that rate good enough?
It must be for a lot of the sport’s stakeholders, given the rush to return to play this week. The ACC and Big 12 schools largely have succeeded in keeping enough players healthy and out of contact tracing-guided quarantine. They should, considering that financial resources are a major factor in keeping the testing regimen and staff monitoring required to keep case loads down.
I do wonder how long it will be enough. On accidental bubble campuses — ones like UNC where nearly all students except athletes have been sent home — it will be easier. Where students are still around, it’ll be harder.
The New York Times did a study recently looking at counties with college campuses versus ones without. Both sets of counties peaked in cases in mid-July, with college counties a little above 15 cases per 100,000 residents and non-college counties a bit over 20 per 100,000. But while the non-college counties have continued falling, college counties spiked in mid-August and are now up over 20 per 100,000. It’s not hard to figure out what changed.
UF’s football program went two months without any positive tests, but now that students have been back on campus for a couple weeks, there were seven announced positive tests. Florida may have more resources than most to throw at testing, but testing doesn’t prevent anything. It provides more information, but people still have to do their best with what that information tells them.
The SEC, by delaying until the final week of September, gave their programs some time to figure out their best course of action after the return of students. Florida is now using that time in light of those positive tests. I don’t know if the coaches would prefer the way things are or trying to manage things on the fly while playing like ACC and Big 12 teams are, but from the outside the extra time looks like a smart move.
Will it also seem a smart move that the conferences that postponed changed course? That is less clear to me. It’s easy to paint a picture either way depending on how many game postponements and cancelations happen.
After all, it seems inevitable that at some point a Power 5 conference game will not happen as scheduled. It’s too much good luck to ask out of a year of bad luck for that not to happen.
If it’s a smaller number, then the choices to scrap the spring football idea and go for the fall will in hindsight look fine. Or, at least, no less fine than the decisions to not postpone that the other conferences made. However if there is a cascade of scuttled games, they’ll look like they were rowing their lifeboats toward the sinking ship, or bought at the top of the market, or choose your metaphor here. They’ll have lost the courage of their convictions right at the time they needed them most.
I certainly hope that everything will turn out well, that most programs do not experience outbreaks, and that most games happen as planned. The power brokers of the Big Ten and Pac-12 are probably hoping for that even more. Choosing to play this week wipes out whatever credit for foresight they could want to claim from their cancelations in August. After a rancorous five weeks, the Power 5 are all back in this together.