College athletics has found itself staring at a sloppier, longer redux of March 12.
That day, one by one, conferences made decisions to pack up and trudge into retreat against an unrelenting enemy. Lost in that hellscape was the method in which they shuttered sports. There was no decree from above halting everything at once, because no one exists to give it.
Rather, over the span of one morning, each league shuttered its conference basketball tournament before the NCAA canceled March Madness later that day. The process felt relatively harmless at the time, because everyone reached the only acceptable conclusion. Yet it was indicative of a structure that could prove problematic if the coronavirus ended up impacting college football.
Well, here we are in the same spot five months later, the virus still a torrent with no barriers. Let’s be clear first: college football is on the brink because the virus is not contained. Full stop. But college football’s play-or-don’t-play decision has become a charade because of a lack of centralized leadership and communication.
The Power Five is now the Power Three. The Group of Five is the Group of Three. The Big Ten, Pac-12, Mid-American and Mountain West are out. Everyone else is still in, for now.
If no one else cancels and the season goes forward this fall, it will do so without 40 percent of the Football Bowl Subdivision teams playing. NCAA President Mark Emmert — a quiet man during a week of reckoning for his most profitable sport — foreshadowed the mess last week.
“It’s actually going to have to be each institution,” Emmert said about the decision-making process for playing football.
College football’s leadership is a hodgepodge of people and groups in charge who have unalike priorities and listen to different people. It’s a recipe for fracturing at the worst possible time.
Despite frequent contact for five months, conference commissioners and university presidents, in the end, are acting with little togetherness in deciding if the levees supporting football this fall are made of paper or concrete. The Big 12 essentially was the swing vote that decided, for now, to keep the season afloat.
“Right now, there’s not a lot of communication among conferences,” American Athletic Conference Commissioner Mike Aresco told The Athletic Monday. “Everybody seems to be completely on their own and there’s very little overall leadership. So we’re on our own and we individually have to show leadership and do what we think is right. So we’ll see.”
Instead of a unified process, this has felt like a five-way standoff with the drama of a presidential election that came down to one state. And this time, unlike March, the correct decision is less clear.
No one dared forge on with sports then. Now, though, the idea of college football this fall doesn’t sound as reckless or negligent depending on who is asked. Each conference has their own medical advisory board it has consulted about the safety and health risks of playing a season.
The chairman of the ACC’s advisory board said he thinks it’s safe to play. When the MAC became the first league to cancel its season, commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said its board was “unequivocal” in an agreement playing football would not be safe. The Pac-12’s board echoed the MAC, while the SEC’s board had the same stance as the ACC’s. The AAC’s experts have not told them to axe the season.
“We want to play because we think there’s no medical reason at this point for not playing,” Aresco said in a radio interview Monday. “We think there’s a reason to keep moving for now to see. Our medical people don’t feel anything has changed in recent days to prompt a decision like this that comes kind of suddenly.”
The difference in message makes public buy-in to either decision difficult. The apparent contradictions and lack of transparency do as well. For instance, athletic directors and coaches across the country parroted all summer the general student population’s return will be a significant factor in the decision. Turns out, some decisions were made before anything could be learned from having a campus full of students this fall.
If there were an FBS advisory board, central commissioner or legal counsel, perhaps a season would still exist (or have already been blown up in unison, but that still sounds better than this possible slow demise). Better yet, had everyone agreed to start in late September, a decision to play wouldn’t be required for another few weeks. Wishful thinking. Individual decisions on season lengths and start dates created varying timelines for a final ruling.
The players, who largely spent this summer adhering to protocols and helping produce encouraging test results, can see through the discord, as Wyoming quarterback Sean Chambers did.
“It starts from the top with the [NCAA],” Chambers tweeted Monday. “If there was any semblance of leadership, we wouldn’t be in this mess. No direction or leadership lead us to a decision like this. Now us athletes have to reap the consequences that we don’t deserve.”
In normal times, the sport has survived and thrived with no one in charge, its conferences’ egos and competing interests dictating the rules. This is the structure they have chosen. No conference commissioner wants to give up power. Conferences want freedom to decide on things like scheduling principles and the legality of recruiting tactics like satellite camps. Generally, it works fine.
But in modern college football’s greatest need for togetherness, one leader sure would be helpful in uniting everyone under common interests.
“It's never been more obvious that we have to be on the same page,” North Carolina head coach Mack Brown said last month.
Really, reaching this point was an obvious outcome five months ago, when the cracks in the system were visible.
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