SBJ College: Football Season Hanging By A Thread

I knew the Big Ten news was coming today, but I still thought the conference might delay a decision rather than cancel the season. College football without Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State is hard to fathom.

Here is what's cookin' on campus.

BIG TEN, PAC-12 MAKE IT OFFICIAL

• The Big Ten and Pac-12 have made their move. They will not play football this fall. Now we sort through the spillage to find out what this means.
  
  
  • The ball is now in the court of the ACC, SEC and Big 12. I’m told the ACC and SEC are inclined to keep moving toward a season as long as the Big 12 comes along. If the Big 12 opts out, it becomes tougher for the ACC and SEC to play.
    
    
  • Both the Big Ten and Pac-12 say they’ll consider options in the spring, but that’s a non-starter for a lot of administrators. Playing two full football seasons in one calendar year would be asking a lot of the college athletes. An alternative: Play a three-game series of games at the end of spring practice, make a little money, and get fans back in the stadium.
    
    
  • What fills the void in the absence of college football this fall? This was already set up to be a unique fall with the MLB, NBA and NHL playing their postseasons, not to mention major golf and tennis tournaments and Triple Crown races. And then there is the NFL possibly playing more games on Saturdays and Don Yee’s developmental football enterprise that combines games and workouts. Yee, the agent for Tom Brady, could look very opportunistic here.
    
    
  • I find myself asking this question a lot: Does this year count? It applies to media contracts, sponsorships, athlete eligibility, coaches’ contracts, season tickets and donations. Does everything roll over to 2021 as if 2020 never happened? There will be a lot to figure out in the aftermath of canceled seasons. 

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

• Reaction to the Big Ten and Pac-12 news today was swift, with one consensus emerging: This felt like March 12 all over again.
  
  
  • ESPN's Peter Burns: "If no one plays college football this fall, you likely aren't playing basketball or sports in the spring as well. College athletics and likely the NCAA will be forever damaged and perhaps cease to exist as a whole. A absolute devastating day in sports."
    
    
  • Andrew Brandt: "Would expect some top NFL prospects from these conferences to move on, begin 2021 draft prep. Too much uncertainty to wait around."
    
    
  • SI's Pat Forde: "To reiterate: the fate of fall football pretty much rests in the lap of the Big 12 -- a league that has been, shall we say, a bit fractious and flaky at times."
    
    
  • CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd: "It's a full-on crisis in the @bigten. Never thought I'd see the day. The league started in 1896, survived two World Wars, 9/11, has a season cancelled by the virus. More than that, it has at least one member ready to step outside the league because of that decision."
    
    
  • Louisville-based radio host Mark Ennis: "The Pac 12 medical document is hard to read if you’re an athlete at those schools. The myocarditis concerns are real and valid. The community spread and lack of rapid testing is the result of a failure of leadership across the board. And they pay for it."
    
    
  • FS1's Jason McIntyre: "Prediction: Half a dozen high profile college basketball players move on to International basketball or G-League for a year to make money and play in a (safer) environment after today's college football decision."
    
    
  • Fox' Urban Meyer on potential of spring football: "No chance. You can't ask student-athletes to play two seasons in one calendar year."
    
    
  • Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel: "One concern in B10 (that isn’t being mentioned) is players being infected by opposing team and then infecting fellow students back on campus. 'We have to be concerned with more than one team,' one B10 leader said."

DUKE DOCTOR SAYS "PSEUDO-BUBBLE" POSSIBLE

• I wrote earlier today that the ACC’s top doctor says college football can be played safely. Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease expert at Duke, said a season would come with some level of risk, but it could be mitigated by what he called a “pseudo-bubble” strategy.
  
  
• Professional leagues like the NBA and NHL have effectively used a bubble approach to keep players isolated. Both leagues, in fact, have had zero positive tests since entering their respective bubbles last month. Wolfe said schools in the ACC could benefit from elements of the bubble on campus. “We’ve tried to model after that as much as possible,” Wolfe said. “But the bubble requires that you don’t travel and that you don’t come in contact with anyone else on campus. These are college kids and they’re going to take classes.”
  
  
• In a pseudo-bubble, college athletes live in a different place, take classes online, have their meals delivered and work out as small units. “They’d move together, eat together, live together and test together,” Wolfe said. “It’s why I think football absolutely can move forward.” The other part of the scenario, Wolfe acknowledged, is that college athletes are not paid professionals “and that makes these very different issues.”
  
  
• When I asked Wolfe about his experience as chair of the ACC’s medical advisory team, he said the questions and focus have changed, especially on the field. Wolfe: “The kind of question I was getting four months ago was how do we clean the baseball to make it safe. But our knowledge has evolved so that we know the baseball isn’t the biggest issue. We should be more worried about where people are sitting in the dugout. Instead of worrying about the quarterback getting sacked for a couple of seconds, there’s actually less risk in that than him standing beside 50 other players for longer periods of time.”

SPEED READS

• A Supreme Court decision today ends NCAA limits on education-related benefits for college athletes. Justice Elena Kagan’s ruling "sets the stage for at least one recruiting cycle in which schools will be able to decide on a conference-level basis whether to allow offers to football, men’s basketball and/or women’s basketball players that go beyond covering the full cost of attending school," per USA Today's Steve Berkowitz.
  
  
• PGA champion Collin Morikawa was Cal’s first four-time All-American in the golf team’s history. The 23-year old is still the reigning Pac-12 individual champion. This nugget from Golf Digest: Morikawa's caddie, J.J. Jakovac, won two individual national championships for D-II Chico State in the early 2000's. 
  
  
• Georgia State's 15-year, $21.5 million naming-rights agreement with Center Parc Credit Union was made official earlier today after the contract gained approval from the University System of Georgia Board. The deal gives the Panthers one of the richest football stadium naming-rights deals outside of the Power 5 conferences.  Last week, I wrote about how Van Wagner Sports & Entertainment had been in the marketplace for about two years trying to sell rights to the stadium.
  
  
  

Center Parc CEO Chuck Head and his team visited the Georgia State field today once the naming rights deal was official

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Something on the College beat catch your eye? Tell us about it. Reach out to either me (msmith@sportsbusinessjournal.com) or Austin Karp (akarp@sportsbusinessjournal.com) and we'll share the best of it. Also contributing to this newsletter is Thomas Leary (tleary@sportsbusinessdaily.com).