College football is a sport governed by tradition and coached by the anal retentive. But in 2020, it is operating on the fly, and all of us — coaches, players, officials and fans — are living at the mercy of a long nasal swab.
The calendar says it’s late October. The colors of leaves and the emergence of sweaters say the same. But here on Planet College Football, the concept of time is hard to grasp. The game’s internal clock needs a reboot. The coronavirus pandemic has taken our mileposts and shuffled them like a deck of cards. The calendar can’t tell you who’s on the schedule, the way it has for generations. Michigan and Minnesota are playing Saturday night for the 104th time, but the Little Brown Jug game has never been a season opener. The calendar might say it’s Week 8, but for the Big Ten, it’s Week 1. Those early-season mistakes we’ve endured for the past month? Get ready for another month of them. Northwestern,3-9 in 2019, sat out bowl season. The Wildcats haven’t played in 47 weeks. „It’s been a long time since we tackled in a live game,“ Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald said. We assume Northwestern will open against Maryland on Saturday night. The schedule is drawn up, but it can’t tell you which games actually will be played. Games are postponed days before kickoff. Games are scheduled the week before they’re played. Midweek reports of COVID-19 test results are becoming as dramatic and meaningful as final scores. This is not the college football we signed up for. This is the college football we have. It sounds ungrateful to say, when we’re lucky to have any college football at all. But, in reality, this season is discombobulating. It’s difficult to trust in the narrative of the season when we don’t know who’s going to show up on Saturdays, when we can’t look at the calendar and have tradition tell us who is playing.
