Members of the Miami of Ohio team pose on the field after winning the 2019 Mid-American Conference championship.
Photo: Carlos Osorio/Associated PressThe Mid-American Conference won’t play sports including football this fall because of health concerns posed by the coronavirus pandemic, becoming the first league in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision to punt on sports.
The cancellation carries major implications for college football, a sport that serves as the financial engine of most athletic departments. The fall schedule grows more uncertain by the day as cancellations and questions about safety pile up.
When the coronavirus first shuttered NCAA sports in March, college football had the benefit of time to get a plan in place for a 2020 season. But as coronavirus cases rose over the summer, including on campuses where outbreaks interrupted voluntary workouts, dozens of smaller universities began abandoning fall sports. On Wednesday, the NCAA announced that it would not hold championships for fall sports in Divisions II and III.
Football remains on the table in Division I, at least for now. The biggest conferences, including the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference, have canceled nonconference games and rearranged schedules so that their member teams only play each other.
But other questions are surfacing. Discontent is brewing among college athletes, who say they fear that their health and safety is being jeopardized for the sake of athletic department revenue. Hundreds, if not thousands, of players from the Pac-12, Big Ten, Mountain West and American Athletic Conferences have organized into grass roots coalitions to make various demands of the conferences ahead of the season.
MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said the wave of athlete activism didn’t inform the conference’s decision to cancel sports. “You certainly are aware of what’s going on around you,” he said. “[But] this was a decision based on the guidance of our health experts.” He added: “This isn’t a financial decision. It’s a health and well-being decision”
Many of the conferences that compete in the lower-tier Football Championship Subdivision have voted to move their seasons, including football, to the spring, a shift that would be mandated for the entire subdivision should more than 50% of the FCS teams call off the fall season.
Prior to Saturday, the only program in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision to cancel its season was the newly independent University of Connecticut. When asked about the decision Wednesday, coach Randy Edsall said that if he were coaching in a major conference, “I’d be doing the same thing. Because these young men’s lives are more important than money.”
The MAC came to the same conclusion. Presidents from the conference’s schools met on Saturday to discuss whether it would be safe to stage competitions for fall sports. Northern Illinois University president Lisa Freeman, a medical researcher by training, had previously warned that she may not permit the Huskies to play sports even if the rest of the conference proceeded.
The presidents voted unanimously to cancel fall sports, which include cross country, field hockey, football, soccer and volleyball. Per a statement released Saturday morning, the MAC intends to “provide competitive opportunities for the student-athletes in these sports during the spring semester of 2021.”
The MAC’s football ambitions for 2020 were thrown into disarray in early July when the Big Ten Conference said it would not play any nonconference games. The surprise announcement eliminated 11 contests with MAC schools and, with them, millions of dollars in revenue from guarantee games. Bowling Green athletic director Bob Moosbrugger said that his school lost $2.2 million from its $24 million athletic budget when games against Ohio State and Illinois evaporated.
Now it is the MAC whose cancellations will send shock waves through the so-called Power Five conferences. Although the Pac-12 and SEC joined the Big Ten in striking nonconference games, the Atlantic Coast and Big 12 Conferences left room for one nonleague home game on their schedules. The ACC unveiled its 11-game schedule this week, which included two games against schools from the MAC: Ohio at Boston College in the season opener on Sept. 12 and Western Michigan at Notre Dame the following Saturday. The Big 12 hasn’t yet released its 10-game schedule.
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Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com
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