Let’s just have a thread for all things College Football
And to kick things off, the B1G will become the first power conference to drop the non-conference schedule this year due to the pandemic.
I think the real reason they did this was Ohio State was afraid to play Oregon this year.
They are just cutting back so the inevitable full season cancellation wont be as much of a blow.
The Ivy cancelled all fall sports. ACC set a 9/1 earliest start date, but looking like they’re going to cancel as well.
All they’re doing is buying themselves a few weeks before the next blow comes.
I must say that the message for wearing masks is really being done wrong. Tell people that the only way we will have football in the fall is if everyone wears a mask in public for the next two months and we would solve the mask wearing issue immediately, especially in the south. I mean imagine in they told SEC country if everyone doesn’t wear a mask until September there will be no football. People would wear them out of fear of death by fan bludgeoning.
SC’s governor Henry McMaster did exactly that, but I’d hardly hold him up as a good example of how to handle the pandemic.
He’s been slow and reluctant to actually act in any way.
While denying big paydays to teams from smaller conferences, the decision also cancels some significant games, starting with Southern California against Alabama in Arlington, Texas on Sept. 5 as well Notre Dame games against USC and Stanford.
“With the Pac-12’s decision to move to a conference-only schedule, we will do our best to adjust,” Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne said on Twitter. “What that looks like is to be determined.”
By next month teams will be planning a schedule of 5 games of their own defense against their own offense.
Are you ready for some Playstation? Because that’s the only football happening this fall. We could have been Europe, but instead we decided to be Brazil.
If only I still had a PS3.
Local article touching on some of the difficulties facing a mid-tier university that consistently underperforms in D1 football.
Akron’s athletic department costs ~$37m a year to run, $26m of which comes from “direct institutional aid”: in other words, they’re massively in the hole every single year and the article notes only 29(!) athletic programs were self-sufficient as of 2018.
Because of university-wide budget cuts ($4.4m+) and their game with Clemson this year being almost certainly cancelled ($1.1m) they need to find some more places to shed cost. Moving to Division II or dissolving the football program have both been put forward for consideration, but the loss of media contracts and guaranteed paydays for losing to a Power 5 school plus conference exit costs end up hurting even more.
I have a very strong feeling there will be NFL football this fall. College? Maybe not.
The NJCAA ( National Junior College Athletic Association ) has officially cancelled fall football and will instead plan on playing in spring 2021.
Of course this may have no effect at all for the NCAA but it does set a precedent.
For those w/o hugely ginormous TV contracts.
This seemed inevitable:
The decision to limit competition to Conference-only opponents and rescheduling the SEC Championship Game is based on the need for maximum flexibility in making any necessary scheduling adjustments while reacting to developments around the pandemic and continued advice from medical professionals.
“We believe these schedule adjustments offer the best opportunity to complete a full season by giving us the ability to adapt to the fluid nature of the virus and the flexibility to adjust schedules as necessary if disruptions occur,” Sankey said. “It is regrettable that some of our traditional non-conference rivalries cannot take place in 2020 under this plan, but these are unique, and hopefully temporary, circumstances that call for unconventional measures.”
ACC did this either yesterday or Tuesday, so yep. All Power 5 conferences will follow suit to at least try to play a fall season.
Also, Notre Dame is included in the ACC conference only schedule.
I hope some these scheduling trends catch on and become permanent. It’s not clear what the SEC is doing yet, but the ACC has abandoned divisions for this season. It’s another step closer to pod scheduling, which makes a lot of sense for conferences of unwieldy sizes, which is all of the power five excluding the Big 12.
Not that I’ve arrived at a point where I expect college sports to actually happen this year.
So they should scale back to what many European colleges are all about. Have college for education instead of sports.