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What just a couple of weeks ago sounded like a preposterous notion to some is suddenly getting traction, as meeting-takers and contingency-planners like to say. And if ever there was a time for multiple contingencies it’s the college football world right now.
Spring football? Get your mind around the concept. While nobody can predict what might happen once governors and university presidents make decisions on whether to open schools for fall semesters and quarters, it’s certainly a possibility that’s now being unpacked.
(If I get any worse with these buzzwords, just send out an emissary to have me sedated.)
I’m not going to pretend I came up with the idea for playing college football in the spring because of the coronavirus, but I might’ve heard it from one of the first people to float the plan. Ted Gangi, a Dallas-based webmaster I know through college football and basketball trade associations who’s particularly well-connected with the sports movers and shakers, should be credited as being the champion of the concept before anyone I know took it seriously.
Gangi realized weeks ago the overwhelming complications that could well scuttle any attempt at putting on even a shortened season in the fall. And I realize that some, especially in SEC and Big 12 country, are determined to have their season on time. I even can see a cultural divide forming over this with hellbent red-staters and cautious blue-staters pitted against each other.
But what we want and what we can have are often two very different things. Big boys and girls realize that.
And as I’ve detailed in previous dispatches, what the professionals can do because of collective bargaining and what colleges can do when they’ve not even managed to admit their players are employees, is also very different. Further, the overlords of most college programs are state universities supported by state taxpayers.
Anyway, assuming everyone eventually settles on turning the pages in unison, how would you hold a college football season in the late semester? Specifically, how would the Power Five schools manage to schedule concurrently with college basketball?
It’s a coordination dilemma unmatched in the history of college athletics – both cash cows forced into the same space. Football is without question the family breadwinner, usually 5 to 10 times the gross revenue and profit margin as men’s basketball. But the latter sport and its NCAA tournament payout cannot be dismissed as pocket change. For P5 schools, it sort of serves as the year’s discretionary income. For most Group of 5s and below, it’s virtually the whole pie.
So, for the purposes of this study, let’s assume the NFL does hold its season in the fall with the usual early-February completion. Not that we can count on that yet. But I do think it’s likely and we need to start somewhere.
In that case, here’s a prospective 13-week, 12-game spring college regular season, followed by the postseason, that fulfills two needs: 1. It finishes within the schools’ fiscal year, which ends June 30. 2. It avoids conflict with the NCAA tournament which is vital in that it’s a substantial source of income for all the athletic departments, but an especially high percentage for everyone other than the 65 Power Five football schools.
I also don’t pretend to have thought of everything here. Everyone’s Alice trying to sift through this weird Wonderland. Call this is an extremely rough draft open for suggestions and corrections.
This spring regular season is more or less bisected by the NCAA tournament. So, I’ve divided it into 3 sections – weeks 1-3 (pre-tournament), weeks 4-7 (tournament), and weeks 8-13 (post-tournament), printed in bold. I’ve interspersed important basketball postseason events throughout, printed in italics:
Week 1: February 20
Week 2: February 27
Low-major conference tournaments, Feb. 28-Mar. 5
Week 3: March 6
Mid-and high-major conference tournaments, Mar. 7-12
If there is a non-conference season, this segment will account for most of it. If you think of mid-to-late February as colder in the Upper Midwest and Northeast than mid-to-late November, well, you’re right. According to our friend Penn State meteorology professor Jon Nese, high temperatures are about 4-8° colder in State College in the late winter compared with the late fall.
I asked him to compare the commensurate coldest days at the beginning of a spring season and the end of a fall season, working backward from the end of November and forward from late February. Here’s how the average high temperatures match up. As you can see, it takes longer to warm up early in the calendar year than it does to cool down late in the calendar year:
Nov. 30: 43°; Feb. 20: 39°.
Nov. 23: 47°; Feb. 27: 40°
Nov. 16: 50°; Mar. 6: 43°
Nov. 9: 53°; Mar. 13: 45°
But it’s a necessary tradeoff for completing the season before the South becomes a boiling cauldron in June.
What we could also see more of is snow. The average snowfall totals for places like State College and East Lansing and Madison are somewhat higher in February than November. We could only hope for another winter reprieve like the one Centre County enjoyed this past winter when almost no snow fell at all.
The strange part would be seeing early-season offenses finding their way in cold weather. Coordinators whose schemes hit the ground running will be at a premium. You can expect defenses to be way ahead relative to normal with passing possibly affected by frigid temperatures.
Both college football and basketball schedules could be amended to spread more weekend games through Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays during this segment. Remember, no high school or (we’re presuming) pro football to contend with. More space to stay out of each other’s way.
Week 4: March 13
Selection Sunday, March 14
NCAA First Four, March 16-17
NCAA first round, March 18-19
NCAA second round, March 20-21
Week 5: March 20 (suggested bye week)
NCAA regional semis, March 25-26
NCAA regional finals, March 27-28
Week 6: March 27 (all games begin <2:30 EDT)
Week 7: April 3 (all games begin <2:30 EDT)
NCAA Final Four national semis, April 3
NCAA Final Four championship, April 5
This is the sector where it’s vitally important for football to allow the NCAA tournaments some space. The most crucial is the first two rounds. That can be best addressed by suggesting, if not mandating, that virtually everyone take their byes in Week 5. That’s not optimum for football players, a little too early. But it does fall nicely in between their non-con and league seasons.
The only other part of the football season that really needs revision are the late games in Week 7 (they would conflict with the NCAA regional finals, half of which are played on Saturday night) and Week 8 (they would conflict with the two national semifinals, both of which are played on Saturday night). College football can still play day games, just so they are wrapped up by 6 p.m. So, I’d suggest bumping back kick times to 11 and 2:30 EDT in the East, noon CDT in the Plains, noon MDT in the Rockies, and 11 PDT in the West.
Week 8: April 10
Week 9: April 17
Week 10: April 24
Week 11: May 1
Week 12: May 8
Week 13: May 15
Conference championships: May 22
CFP semis: June 5
CFP final: June 14
Fortunately, four of the Power Five conference title games are held in climate-controlled domes (Indianapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas). Only the ACC game in Charlotte will be outside and that’s at night.
Then, the College Football Playoff semifinals will be hosted by the Sugar Bowl at the Superdome in New Orleans and the Rose Bowl in reasonably temperate Pasadena. No problem indoors in NOLA for the 7:45 CDT kick, though the air conditioning would certainly be taxed.
As for SoCal, we’d hope for no Santa Ana winds off the desert. It’s 78° on average for a high temperature in Pasadena on June 5. But the usual 2 p.m. PST kick on or around New Year’s, when the sun’s angle is gentle, is no comparison to the almost directly overhead beam two weeks before the summer solstice. Maybe we could swap game times and have the Rose Bowl kick at 5:45 PDT?
Because the weather is a little more extreme during the February-June season than the conventional September-January one, we might want to consider opening up optional weeks at the beginning and end of the season, say a Week 0 on or about February 13 and a Week 14 on May 22 (then bumping conference championships to the open May 29). That way, the hot-weather schools could opt to open up their schedules a week early while the cold-weather schools could wait a week and finish up later.
The second- and third-tier bowls? Boy, I don’t know. So many of them are so superfluous already, simply TV fodder during the programming lull of December. And there would be no such lull in a suddenly jampacked May, presumably teeming with the NBA and NHL playoffs, MLB, Triple Crown, races and anything else permitted should COVID-19 be under some sort of control. And if you think NFL prospects skipped them before, their exodus from bowls after the NFL Draft would be of another degree entirely. I honestly don’t see a place for many of them in this contingency. Moreover, a lot of top players might decide to skip pieces or all of their regular schedules if they occurred in the spring, let alone meaningless bowls.
Regardless, I feel as if a spring season must be finished by mid-June at the latest because most students are leaving or have left school by then. And you have to give the vast majority of athletes a break before starting up another football training camp in three months.
Further, I think, if this spring season does become a reality, the 2021 season must be shortened at the front and not begun until the first of October at the earliest, with camp not held until the last week of August. Quite possibly, both seasons would be shortened. To me, it’s the only sane thing to do.
Then again, what these days counts as sanity? Who would’ve thought of spring college football as anything but insane until a few weeks ago?
Certainly, it wouldn’t be a new normal. But if there’s to be a season at all, maybe a necessary anomaly.
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More PennLive sports coverage:
• Penn State will honor scholarships for spring seniors who return; cost will be about $700,000.
• See Penn State football’s new depth chart; who has first-team designations despite no spring drills?
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