Cal Football: UC President's Comments Suggest Fall Season Unlikely
You have to read between the lines, but what UC President Janet Napolitano said this week does not paint an optimistic picture for Cal starting its 2020 football season on August 29 as scheduled.
“I think it’s fair to say none of our campuses will fully reopen [in the fall],” Napolitano said in a San Francisco Chronicle report that appeared Saturday. “I think what some of our campuses are exploring is a mix, where there will be some material delivered in a classroom or lab setting, so-called wet labs, and other classes will continue to be online.”
According to the Chronicle article, Cal officials recently sent messages to students saying they plan to “continue to offer remote instruction as an option for Fall 2020, even if classes are held in-person.”
Professors and lecturers in some departments at Cal were told that fall classes will be offered online, with only a few exceptions for classes with a limited number of students.
How is that relevant to Cal’s football season?
You may recall that the commissioners of the 10 major football conferences told Vice President Mike Pence two weeks ago that if students are not back on campus, then no games will be played.
So let’s put two and two together. It appears Cal students will not be fully engaged in on-campus classes this fall, so Cal would not be playing football games in the fall.
Things could change between now and August, especially since Napolitano is scheduled to leave her post on August 1, but the trend is not promising for fall football.
Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a recent message on the university website that university officials will not decide until June whether classes will be conducted on campus in the fall quarter.
The University of Arizona plans to bring students and faculty back to campus for in-person instruction in the fall, yet university president Dr. Robert Robbins suggests fall football is unlikely.
"I'm really concerned about whether we're going to be playing football in the fall," Robbins told radio station KVOI-AM in Tucson, according to ESPN.com. "My sense, right now, I just don't see that happening."
So if fall football is a long shot for a Pac-12 school that expects to have students back on campus, what are the odds of a school in the same conference playing football in the fall if classes are still being taught online?
This week’s ESPN.com survey of conference commissioners and athletic directors confirmed the prevailing notion that officials from FBS schools are determined to have a football season of some kind.
The scenarios most often discussed include a season that would not start until November or December, a season of conference-games only, games played with no spectators or a limited number of spectators in the stands, and a spring season with bowl games played in May or June. Inherent in all those scenarios is the possibility that a season might begin but has to be halted because a second wave of the coronavirus occurs.
For Cal, Stanford, USC and UCLA, decisions by federal government officials and California Governor Gavin Newsom will play a major role in determining when football can continue.
A month ago, Governor Newsom said he did not expect NFL games to be played in full stadiums in August and September.
It's possible that Cal’s season-opening opponent, UNLV, would be ready to host the game on Aug. 29, since Nevada, with its 5,300 confirmed COVID-19 cases, is likely to return to normalcy more quickly than California, with its 52.000 coronavirus cases. But president Napolitano’s assertion that UC schools are unlikely to have on-campus classes in the fall suggests the Golden Bears are unlikely to be ready to face the Rebels--on Aug. 29, that is.
