SALT LAKE CITY — Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of our ongoing miniseries, College Football is a Big Hot Mess. Today’s episode stars the dithering, nail-biting, thoroughly perplexed Big (Mess) Ten.
It took only two months of fretting, but the league has made another final decision to reverse its previous final decision. Big Ten officials announced they are going to play football this fall after all, and this time they really mean it.
Maybe.
First they were in, but only for conference games, then they were out and were going to play in the spring, or maybe indoors in the winter, but anyway they said they definitely weren’t changing their minds.
And now they’ve changed their minds.
And, surprise! so did two other conferences. As soon as the Big Ten announced its return, word spread that the Pac-12 and the Mountain West will try to return this season (the Mid-American Conference remains determined to remain on the sideline).
The Big Ten Conference — under pressure from coaches, players, players’ parents, school administrators and the president of the United States — announced Aug. 28 that it would begin exploring the possibility of playing football this fall. It took league officials — a “task force” — another three weeks to study the COVID-19/football issue to actually decide to play. What were they studying that long, their horoscopes? Six other leagues plus the NFL are well underway with effective COVID-19 protocols in place; couldn’t they have called and asked them how they were doing it?
The league says it will start the 2020 season Oct. 24 and play eight straight weeks, which means their season will end, let’s see, in mid-December, just as the Midwest winter is settling in. A week later they will play the conference championship game just a few days before Christmas and one day before the selection of the College Football Playoff field. There are no bye weeks, which means, if they encounter a virus flare-up like the “small one” BYU experienced, there will be no making up the game.
The Big Ten said it reached its decision because of the development of daily COVID-19 testing and more confidence in the medical data.
That might be part of it, but it’s difficult to believe this wasn’t about more than that. The public outcry in the Big Ten surely played a huge role. So did the actions of their rival conferences. They undoubtedly were worried when they saw that three of the five Power Five conferences — ACC, SEC, Big 12 — were going ahead with their football seasons, and that the Big Ten and Pac-12 were getting left behind.
They would lose out on millions in revenues and future recruits. It would’ve been an unmitigated disaster for athletic departments (see the University of Utah, which furloughed its athletic department employees, coaches included). As has been repeatedly noted here, Big Ten officials had access to the same information as the ACC, SEC and Big 12 and came up with a radically different view of it than those leagues. When the Big Ten announced in August that it was canceling the season, President Donald Trump even offered to help the league with testing.
Let’s recap the Big Ten’s circuitous path to this week’s decision to resurrect its football season. On July 9, Big Ten officials announced the league would play only conference games because of the pandemic.
On Aug. 5, they announced their conference-only schedule.
On Aug. 11 — less than a week later — they announced they would cancel the entire season with hopes of playing in the spring. Kevin Warren, the league’s commissioner in charge of indecision, said the decision “will not be revisited.” The Journal Sentinel reported that the league was working on an indoor schedule set to start in January, which is not in the spring of course.
On Aug. 28 — about two weeks after saying the decision to skip the fall season would not be revisited — the conference revisited the decision after much public pressure had been exerted. Even Trump called Warren two weeks ago to urge the league to play this season.
On Sept. 16, the Big Ten announced it will play the season, after all.
Meanwhile, Larry Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, said Wednesday that the return of football was problematic because Oregon and California prohibited contact sports, but the governors of those states said the league would be allowed to play football. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said state guidelines did not prevent the Pac-12 from returning to the field, although, as Jon Wilner, of the Mercury News noted, the governor is contradicting state COVID-19 guidelines — specifically, that no more than 12 people can train together, “all members of the same team, who consistently work out and participate in activities together. Cohorts should avoid mixing with other groups.”
In other words, more confusion. But the Pac-12 will reverse field like the others and begin play some time late next month. College football is making a fourth-quarter comeback.