Back in April, not long after the pandemic canceled the NCAA basketball tournament, the idea of moving the 2020 college football to the spring of 2021 …
Back in April, not long after the pandemic canceled the NCAA basketball tournament, the idea of moving the 2020 college football to the spring of 2021 was already being tossed around. A last resort is what it was called by conference commissioners and athletic directors. When it looked as if the U. S. might be winning its fight against COVID-19, the idea of a spring season mostly fell by the wayside. “We broached it very little in our AD meetings and really haven’t gotten serious about it at all,” Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez said Tuesday. “I had one AD from another league call and just talk about it a little bit.” Time to start talking about it a lot. The Big Ten and Pac-12 postponed fall football Tuesday, hoping to salvage a spring season like the Mid-American Conference and Mountain West plan to do. What that looks like is anybody’s guess, but officials in those conferences need to figure out everything from how to prepare in the fall to how much to play in the spring and who exactly is going to be suiting up for these teams. Wisconsin coach Paul Chryst said before a spring football season is planned, there has to be a discussion about fall 2021. “I think the two have to be tied together. In my mind, we’ve made the decision and we’ve canceled the 2020 season,” Chryst said. “Now how do we want to do 2021?” Todd Berry is the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association and a member of the NCAA’s football oversight committee. He said conversations about a spring football season have been minimal, but there has been a theme. “We would all like to go into next fall with some kind of normalcy,” he said. “Protecting next fall becomes pretty significant.
