AUBURN — The first game on Auburn’s 2020 football schedule is supposed to be at home against Alcorn State on Sept. 5. The first game circled on everyone’s calendar is one week later, against North Carolina in a potential top-20 nonconference matchup.
As of Monday, less than six weeks before the first of those games is set to be played, it’s not clear whether either will happen.
That is due, of course, to the global pandemic COVID-19. Rising case numbers in nearly all states across the country has put the fate of the 2020 college football season very much in question.
“We have to see a change in public health trends to build the comfort that we’ll have an opportunity to compete this fall," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said on The Paul Finebaum Show last week.
There already seems to be a good chance that Auburn won’t be able start its season as originally planned, even though the SEC decided at an in-person meeting of all 14 athletic directors a week ago in Birmingham to delay any decisions about the 2020 football schedule until late July.
Brett McMurphy of Stadium reported Friday that the Southwestern Athletic Conference will announce Monday that it plans to cancel all fall sports. Commissioner Charles McClelland told KTVE that the report was “100% inaccurate and premature," but it's not a far-fetched outcome — other FCS conferences, including the Ivy League, MEAC and CAA, have already announced the cancellations of their fall athletic seasons.
Alcorn State is a member of the SWAC. The game contract calls for Auburn to pay a $475,000 guarantee, according to FBSchedules.com.
The Sept. 12 matchup against North Carolina faces similar questions. It’s the third of three Chick-fil-A kickoff games scheduled to be played at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium during the first two weeks of the season, following West Virginia vs. Florida State on Sept. 5 and Virginia vs. Georgia on Sept. 7.
It seemed as if all three of those games might be doubt when McMurphy reported earlier this month that the ACC was expected to follow the Big Ten and Pac-12 in instituting a conference-only schedule. That report, however, appeared premature — ACC commissioner John Swofford later released a statement saying the conference plans to wait until late July to make any decisions about the season, same as the SEC.
Gary Stokan, the president and CEO of the Peach Bowl (which runs those kickoff games), remains optimistic that at least two could still take place — one of those being Auburn-North Carolina — and potentially all three.
“We don’t have any say-so. We’re kind of the tail that doesn’t wag the dog — we’re on the back side of everything, and we’ll just have to wait and see what the SEC, ACC and Big 12 decide,” Stokan told the Montgomery Advertiser. “But I think, philosophically … they’d like to play all their games.”
Stokan does, though, understand the reality that all three games getting canceled is a possibility. That would be an immediate result of a conference-only schedule. But, as Brandon Marcello of 247Sports reported Friday, those three conferences are working to preserve the 14 high-profile nonconference games scheduled between them.
Some of the models being discussed in the event that the full 12-game schedule can’t be played as planned are conference plus-one (the full league slate plus one nonconference game) and conference plus-two. Stokan expects the kickoff games would lose Florida State and Georgia to the plus-one model, as each has a traditional nonconference rival that takes precedent (Florida and Georgia Tech, respectively) — in that scenario, he would try to match up West Virginia and Virginia.
Auburn vs. North Carolina could be played in both scenarios, as neither has a second Power 5 opponent on the schedule. The expected payout was expected to be around $5.2 million to each school, though that number would surely decrease this year given that the pandemic more than likely won’t allow for a full stadium — Stokan said he and his staff are working with state medical personnel on models with 25%, 30% and 50% capacity, and they have already decided to that there won’t be pregame team walks and bands, cheerleaders or presentations on the field.
“The goal is to have the safest environment we can for the players and the coaches and the staffs on the field,” he said, “and we’ll do everything to make that happen, no matter what the costs are and what the impacts of the game are, because the game is the sacred thing to put on.”
Safety remains the biggest hurdle. Alabama is coming off its worst week yet, reporting more new cases and virus deaths in any seven-day span since the pandemic began. Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statewide mask order on Wednesday. States in the rest of the SEC’s footprint aren’t doing much better — Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi and Georgia rank in the top eight nationally with more than 15% of tests coming back positive.
On Thursday, the NCAA announced a set of return-to-sport guidelines — testing athletes 72 hours before competition, 10-day isolation for anyone who tests positive, and 14-day isolation for anyone with high risk of exposure, which can include being within six feet of someone who tested positive for COVID-19 for at least 15 minutes. The idea was to make protocols more uniform across conferences, which could hopefully allow nonconference games to be played.
But those guidelines also outlined reasons to discontinue athletics, which include, most notably, “local community test rates that are considered unsafe by local public health officials” and "local public health officials stating that there is an inability for the hospital infrastructure to accommodate a surge in hospitalizations related to COVID-19."
That seems like it could put the college football season — at least the scheduled start of it — in doubt unless things change significantly over the next six weeks.
“Any recommendation on a pathway toward a safe return to sport will depend on the national trajectory of COVID-19 spread,” NCAA chief medical officer Brian Hainline said. “The idea of sport resocialization is predicated on a scenario of reduced or flattened infection rates.”
"Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction," NCAA president Mark Emmert added. "If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic.”
Stokan is holding out hope that we might get to see Auburn and North Carolina match up on the football field this fall, even if the game doesn’t take place on the original Sept. 12 date. But, for that to happen, conditions related to COVID-19 will have to improve around the country.
“You got two great coaches in Gus Malzahn and Mack Brown,” he said. “You’ve got two of the best young quarterbacks in the country in Sam Howell and Bo Nix. Two teams that are going to be ranked in the top 20 and two teams that are in conversation and picked by people to win their divisions and their conferences. Both have the opportunity to probably to get to the College Football Playoff semifinal games.
“It would be an intriguing game in a lot of ways. We just hope we have the opportunity to do it.”
Josh Vitale is the Auburn beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can follow him on Twitter at @JoshVitale. To reach him by email, click here.
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Uncertainty surrounds start of Auburn football season, marquee matchup vs. North Carolina - Montgomery Advertiser
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