If College Football Is Canceled: 'We’re All Effed. There’s No Other Way to Look at This, Is There?'
We are not sure there will be a college football season in 2020, or whether fans will be allowed to attend if there is. Cal athletic director Jim Knowlton provides a Berkeley perspective in a story available here, and Ross Dellenger and Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated give us a national perspective after speaking to two dozen administrators and college sports experts on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It produced some pretty dramatic responses.
Here is an excerpt from that Sports Illustrated story, followed by a link to the entire SI report:
Gene Corrigan's four decades in college sports seemingly ran the gamut of administrative experiences.
He was a coach and administrator during much of the Vietnam War, experiencing social unrest, campus demonstrations and counterculture movements. As an athletic director at the University of Virginia, he navigated the seismic changes brought on by the implementation of Title IX. He was the ACC commissioner during the conference’s game-changing expansion that added Florida State, and he was president of the NCAA in the mid-1990s while the association grappled with the first major wave of basketball players leaving early for the NBA.
“My dad had to deal with a lot of different things,” says North Carolina State athletic director Boo Corrigan, “but he never had a pandemic.”
Across the country, administrators like Boo Corrigan are grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges—including the realization that life in college athletics may be, at best, temporarily and significantly altered. The impacts of the novel coronavirus to its cash cow, football, could bring a swift, and potentially permanent, end to the golden age of the industry. Just 143 days before its scheduled kickoff, the season’s existence is clouded with uncertainty as a plague hampers the nation, with billions of TV dollars and ticket revenues in jeopardy of disappearing.
Photo by Jeff Hanisch - USA TODAY Sports
Industry executives are already creating contingency plans for a nuclear fall of no football. At Clemson, for instance, Dan Radakovich has commissioned a handful of associates to investigate the what-ifs, calling it a disaster-preparedness committee. “I don’t know that we’ve named it,” he says, “because I don’t have an acronym for doom.”
For years, top-level programs have bathed in cash. They’ve erected lavish facilities, signed coaches to multimillion-dollar contracts and massively increased athletic staff sizes. Revenues have never been greater, giving is at an all-time high and, while attendance has shown a steady decline, premium seating and TV money are taking off. But the gravy train has hit a snag. If it leads to a major downturn in the college football economy, then what? “We’re all effed,” says one Power 5 athletic director who wished to remain anonymous. “There’s no other way to look at this, is there?”
A total or partial loss of the sport could send some athletic departments so deep into the red that one administrator predicted even Power 5 football programs shuttering. But the absence of football is only one piece. The long-term and severe financial impacts from an economic recession could not only reform forever how departments operate but also could spell sweeping changes to the landscape of college athletics—from the formation of a super division to a new wave of conference realignment, from money-saving travel modifications to football scheduling alterations, from discontinued sports to thousands of lost jobs.
Over the last two weeks, about two dozen school administrators and a host of industry experts spoke to Sports Illustrated to answer four pressing college sports questions amid the coronavirus pandemic: 1) When can on-campus practice begin? 2) What are the options for a football season? 3) How significant is football to athletic departments? 4) And how would athletic departments recover from a loss in football revenue? “The discussion that ADs are having about fall sports being canceled is a very real possibility,” says Ramogi Huma, the president of the National College Players Association. “It’s extremely hard to imagine any football in the fall on any level.”
