We would all like nothing more than to discuss the Crimson Tide and Nick Saban’s lustrous hair this fall.
Photo: John Bazemore/Associated Press
What are we going to do about college football?
It feels like a September wedding to which I’ve yet to get a tuxedo. Or rent a car. Or book a hotel room. Or done anything but stare at the invitation, the date of the reception all but mocking the occasion.
Is this really going to happen? Really? Do I need the tuxedo? Who am I kidding?
College football’s vibe isn’t promising. Powerful conferences are looking glumly at each other, wondering who will flinch first and call it off. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have announced they will play only conference games. The Ivy League is out altogether: no fall sports, period. Same with the Patriot League: nothing.
Season-ticket holders at big schools are being told they’re not on the hook for tickets for 2020. If games are played, they’ll be played before limited crowds, or no crowds at all. Michigan announced that it may play before an empty shell at the 107,000-person capacity Big House.
No, I don’t have a cheap Michigan joke here. It’s a bummer! I want 107,000 sobbing Wolverine fans in the Big House when—or more likely, if—my Wisconsin Badgers steamroll into Michigan on Sept. 26.
I guess that’s a cheap Michigan joke. Sorry.
But low crowds—or no crowds—is the sensible move, if these games happen at all.
Meanwhile, the idea of spring football continues to gain steam, despite logistical hurdles, like whether it would make sense to play spring football in 2021 and turn around a few months later and play in the fall. Get ready for that conversation to inhale the sport.
For the fall season, however, there’s pessimism. And it’s OK to report on it, talk about it, process it. There’s this really specious notion out there that to discuss the gloomy mood around college football—or the start of any sport—is to somehow root for its cancellation. This is nonsense. Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to discuss the Crimson Tide and Nick Saban’s lustrous hair, instead of discussing Nick Saban wearing a mask and asking ‘Bama fans to wear one if they want to get college football back. I want everything to come back as soon as safely possible. If I have to teach virtual second grade and kindergarten at home in September, I am really going to lose it.
But to deny the obvious, to not be fact-based, and pretend everything is fine, or will go away, is exactly how we got into this mess in the first place.
“The outlook…is very bleak,” the college football conversationalist/SEC fan shrink Paul Finebaum said the other day.
To state the obvious: colleges aren’t just worried about playing sports in fall. They’re worried about college itself.
Even schools with upbeat situations wonder when the hammer will fall. Notre Dame has reported only one positive case from 252 tests given to its football team, and in South Bend, they feel on track to open on time, both for school and on the gridiron.
But, due to the cancellations in the Big Ten and Pac-12, the Fighting Irish have already lost opponents to three games: Stanford, USC, and an Oct. 3 tilt with my Badgers at Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
“It’s the environment around us kind of collapsing,” Notre Dame’s athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, told the Journal’s Laine Higgins and Louise Radnofsky this week.
Here’s the thing about college football: it’s an amazing spectacle, but organizationally, it’s a cat rodeo. Adam Silver can install the NBA in a bubble and Dana White can fly cage fighters to Fight Island, and the NFL might build itself a stadium on the moon before it abandons its season. But college football has a bazillion teams, conferences, agendas and people who think they’re in charge. Moving swiftly and decisively isn’t what college football does. It took the sport 4,000 years to get to a playoff system, and it’s going to take another 4,000 years to figure out name/image/likeness rules, and that kind of too-many-cooks inertia isn’t what you want when you’re trying to quickly organize a format for football amid a pandemic.
And yes, let’s say it here: losing a sports season is a small crisis in a situation that continues to take lives and sink countless businesses. Football is far from the only industry feeling the pain here.
But there’s going to be pain, both immediate and down the road. College football is a big ecosystem—never bigger, because of the injection of television dollars—and a cancellation of a season has the potential to cause a torrent of repercussions. Athletic directors are bracing for impact.
There’s an existential question here, about money in college sports, and whether all this money and growth—the unfettered expansion and ludicrous, regional-defiant rearrangements of conferences to please TV networks—put disproportionate pressure on football and basketball to carry the system.
The situation has also highlighted fundamental hypocrisies. It has long been a problematic look for a sport with lavishly-paid coaches and ADs to deny financial compensation to the players on the field creating the actual product. It’s even worse to ask them to return, practice and play a contact sport during a health crisis, because of, you know…business concerns.
Jason Gay might not get to see his Wisconsin Badgers take on Michigan in 2020.
Photo: Andy Manis/Associated PressPerhaps it’s an opportunity. When I spoke to former University of Washington head coach Chris Petersen last week—who left the game last year, worn of the grind—he talked about how this might be a chance for the sport to self-evaluate, to revisit this era of growth and ask if the whole thing just has gotten a little too crazy for its own good.
“Maybe with all the things that we’re going through, there’s going to be a big reset on a lot of different things in college sports,” Petersen told me. “I’m hoping that it’s going to be for the better.”
It’s an enticing thought. It will require a herding of that cat rodeo and some heretical thinking, chiefly around the topic of money, and whether or not college sports have been best served by chasing every dollar.
I’ll go back to the question I asked at the top: What are we going to do about college football?
It’s a worthwhile conversation for college football to have. This fall, there may be plenty of time to have it.
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Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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