The SEC has options for playing a football season in 2020. They are just all bad.
In an appearance Monday morning on Dan Patrick’s nationally syndicated radio program, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey walked back his self-imposed deadline of the end of July for deciding whether or not the league will play college football in 2020.
“I am not now of the opinion I have to make a decision (next week),” Sankey said. “The whole thing is fluid.”
Where the Southeastern Conference ultimately lands on the question of whether or not it can play college football amid the coronavirus pandemic shapes up as profoundly consequential. If the SEC decides to play, I believe other Southern conferences up and down the college sports food chain will follow suit.
If the SEC plays, I would guess the ACC and Big 12 will also play. So, too, Conference USA, the Sun Belt and the Ohio Valley Conference.
Whether the Southeastern Conference plays may have influence on what state high school athletics associations in the South ultimately conclude about whether they can have football this year.
What makes the decision facing Sankey — and SEC university administrators such as Kentucky President Eli Capilouto and Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart — so vexing is there are no good options.
1. Not playing SEC football in 2020 will be financially calamitous.
In fiscal year 2018-19 — the most recent year in which data is available at the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Database — the 14 SEC schools reported combined revenue from college football of $993,861,788.
Losing almost $1 billion in revenue epitomizes a bottom-line disaster.
2. Trying to play this fall brings health risks and public-relations minefields.
UK announced last week that all of its 108 football players and 58 football staff members deemed essential had tested negative for COVID-19 through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic testing.
Those results suggested that having players mostly alone on a university campus can form a relatively safe “bubble” away from the virus.
However, as the number of people testing positive for COVID-19 has spiked substantially in recent weeks within SEC states such as Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas — and Kentucky — it raises serious questions about whether you can keep players virus-free once full student bodies return to campuses.
Sankey told Patrick that “the time we can oversee young people, we feel good about. It’s that other part of life we’ve got to continue to manage, particularly as our campus communities fill up.”
The optics of asking college players — who, unlike professional athletes, do not draw salaries nor have union representation — to assume the risk of playing during an ongoing pandemic are fraught with unsavory possibilities.
Strictly from the standpoint of playing games, the best option would be to have teams on campuses while the rest of the student body is doing virtual, distance learning from home.
However, saying that it is too dangerous for normal students to attend school in person yet asking football players to line up nose-to-nose across the line of scrimmage from opponents, to tackle and lay in sweaty piles is potentially a gnarly p.r. problem.
Yet, unless general infection rates start declining substantially and soon, if you bring all students back to campus it may make it impossible to keep football teams healthy enough to play.
3. Moving college football season to the spring brings a new set of problems.
Sankey said Monday that playing the 2020 football season during the second semester of the coming school year is on the SEC’s list of possibilities, but is the last option.
The potential negatives of a spring football season start with long-term player safety.
If you ask college-aged players to play a season in, say, March, April and May of 2021, would it be safe in a physical-recovery sense for them to then have to turn around and play another season starting in September?
Should a player suffer a Terry Wilson-style major injury (torn patellar tendon) during a spring football season, he would almost certainly miss the ensuing fall season, as well.
Meanwhile, in an era when many star-caliber, NFL Draft-eligible players refuse to play in bowl games rather than risk an injury that might negatively impact their pro earnings potential, you have to wonder how many such standouts would sit out an entire spring season.
So in the year of COVID, this is where we stand with SEC football.
Not playing is a financial cataclysm.
Playing in the fall carries health dangers plus potential public-relations troubles.
Moving the season to the spring brings new complications — with no certainty the spread of the virus will have abated by then anyway.
Which bad option the SEC ultimately chooses will have ramifications that reach far beyond the league’s 14 campuses.
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 5:41 PM.
