Apparently the Conferences Can't Agree on What to Do With College Football Season
This is ... not good news.
College football was always going to have the toughest time determining what will happen with its 2020 season, because unlike professional leagues, which are headed by one entity, every school and conference has its own decision makers. But seemingly up until now there had been good communication amongst everyone on what steps needed to be taken to combat coronavirus and how to proceed with some iteration of a college football season.
Well, it now appears that there is some dissension somewhere in the vast group of decision makers, according to South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner. And for a sport which, again, needs cooperation from everyone in order to go forward as planned, that is not what anybody wants to hear.
The obvious interpretation of this quote, in my opinion, is that some conferences are wanting to proceed with the season in the fall — S-E-C! S-E-C! — while other either want to move it to the spring or possibly get rid of it entirely. The latter seems unlikely to me, given the catastrophic ramifications it would have for athletic departments across the country, maybe some schools just don't see it happening and would rather get out in front of it now.
Tanner did add that part at the end about the season possibly being "left up to the conferences," so if push comes to shove, maybe we'd see a 13-game schedule where everybody in the SEC plays everybody else in the conference for once. It would be nice to see everybody else in the SEC East actually have to play Alabama more than their allotted once per six years while Tennessee has to get boat-raced every season.
But obviously we all want the season as close to the way it was planned as possible. Nobody wants to get rid of non-conference game, as those are some of the most fun games of the year — for those schools that schedule half-decent ones, anyway.
These ADs and conference commissioners need to figure it out. Everybody say you're sorry and figure out how to make this thing happen because I think I speak for a large portion of the Southeastern United States when I say I cannot go two years without college football. I can't and I won't.