What could go wrong with a spring college football season? Let’s count the problems.
Trying to get masks on the faces of the recalcitrant in the fight against the coronavirus, the governors of Georgia and South Carolina this week played their trump cards.
If more of the public does not join the battle to contain the spread of COVID-19 by donning face masks, there will be no college football this fall, warned governors Brian Kemp (Georgia) and Henry McMaster (South Carolina).
Just two weeks ago, I would have put the likelihood of the 2020 college football season being played in the fall above 70 percent.
Now, after several states have seen significant spikes in coronavirus spread, I’d put the percentages on the 2020 NCAA football season kicking off at its normal time at about 30 percent.
The quandary that is figuring out a safe way to play college football in a pandemic has been on stark display these past two weeks.
Start with significant upticks of coronavirus cases showing up in warm-weather states such as Arizona, California, Florida, South Carolina and Texas.
As universities have been allowed to bring football players back to campus for “voluntary workouts,” SI.com reports that “at least 150” Division I players have been publicly revealed as having tested positive for the virus.
Clemson has had 37 players test positive. LSU has had at least 30 players quarantined.
If college football is played this fall, a University of Illinois computer science professor told CBSSports.com that he projected a “30 to 50 percent” coronavirus infection rate among the approximately 13,000 FBS players. He also predicted “three to seven” of those infected players would die.
Now, with a fall kickoff looking dicey, there is again burgeoning talk about moving the 2020 college football season to the spring of 2021.
That idea has one obvious benefit: It would buy time, giving researchers more opportunity to develop a coronavirus vaccine and public officials more time to contain the pandemic.
Yet a spring college football season would also come with some unique problems:
1. Long-term injury risk to players. Presumably, you would be asking college football players to play one season that could run through April and into May, then turn around and start the next season in its normal time in September.
You have to wonder if the lack of recovery time for the players’ bodies in such a scenario would lead to more injuries during the second season. You also have to reflect on concussions and any long-term effect on the brain from playing two football seasons in such close proximity of time.
2. The time lost by players who suffer major injuries. You recall that Kentucky quarterback Terry Wilson saw his 2019 season end when he tore the patellar tendon in his left knee in last year’s second game, a 38-17 win for Mark Stoops and troops over Eastern Michigan last Sept. 7.
Wilson recently told the Herald-Leader’s Josh Moore that he would be “100 percent ready for the (2020) season right before (fall) camp.”
If that proves accurate, it will have taken the UK QB 11 months, more or less, to return to full health.
Now, imagine a player suffering an injury of similar severity in the second game of a spring college football season. At most, one would have six months to recover before the next fall season kicked off.
Under a back-to-back spring/fall season scenario, one bad injury could sideline a player for two seasons.
3. Would NFL Draft-eligible stars even play? In recent years, players projected high in NFL Drafts have increasingly skipped playing in bowl games to guard against injuries that might diminish their pro earnings potential.
This year’s NFL Draft was April 23-25. If college football were being played in the spring, it is conceivable the National Football League would push its draft later on the calendar.
But whether that happened or not, it is not farfetched to think a significant number of high-caliber, draft-eligible players would sit out a spring college football season.
The coronavirus and the efforts to contain it have created a financial reckoning in Division I college sports.
Even some prominent athletics departments have dropped sports. Included are Boise State (baseball, women’s swimming and diving), Cincinnati (men’s soccer) and Connecticut (men’s cross country, women’s rowing, men’s swimming and diving and men’s tennis).
So the puzzle of how to safely play a college football season amid a global pandemic is one where all viable options presently look bad.
If there is no college football played in 2020-21, the financial ramifications may be cataclysmic.
Nevertheless, playing football in the fall with the virus still spreading is looking increasingly risky.
Yet moving football to the spring would come with a new set of daunting problems — and no certainty that the coronavirus will be any more effectively contained than it presently is.
This story was originally published July 2, 2020 at 5:07 PM.
