From Inside Red Raider Sports
As summer rolls around with nearly all sports still on pause in the United States, fans anxiously await the return of college football in the fall. Before Week 1 can kick off, however, programs will need ample time to prepare for the season.
Because of that, the hope among some people in college football is that the sport can start to get the ball rolling around June 1. According to a report from Heather Dinich of ESPN on the College Football Podcast, any restart that begins in July may be too late for teams to feel comfortable kicking off on time. Some coaches and administrators believe it would take over a month of preparation before game action can safely resume.
“They’re moving targets,” Dinich said. “I talked to TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati earlier this week. He talked about how they would really like to have some sort of a plan or anything around the June 1 date because if you’re going to start the season on time, you probably need to know that before mid July. The coaches and athletic directors I’ve talked to have said we need 6-8 weeks, eight being the ideal situation to get players back into physical, game condition if the season is going to start on time. Remember, you’ve got Notre Dame and Navy playing in Dublin, Ireland on August 29th with flights booked, hotels booked, the stadium ready, etc. If all of those things are actually going to happen around the beginning of June, you need to kind of figure out where it is.”
The kicker is that the coaches and administrators aren’t fully in control of the timing of all this. They’ll have to see how the COVID-19 pandemic progress and listen to doctors and other health experts about when it will be safe to kickoff. On top of that, the conferences would need to figure how to safely play games without any unnecessary risks to the health of those involved.
“At the same time, this is not their decision,” Dinich said. “Everyone I’ve spoken to on the commissioner level has told me the timetable will be decided by the coronavirus, by the governors, by the state officials and by the medical experts.”
There has been some debate about whether the college football season could begin without regular students on campus. In an interview on Friday, NCAA president Mark Emmert made it clear that no students on campus in any capacity means no student-athletes either.
“All of the commissioners and every president that I’ve talked to is in clear agreement: If you don’t have students on campus, you don’t have student-athletes on campus,” Emmert said. “That doesn’t mean [the school] has to be up and running in the full normal model, but you have to treat the health and well-being of the athletes at least as much as the regular students. … If a school doesn’t reopen, then they’re not going to be playing sports. It’s really that simple.”
