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Commentary: The ACC Played On

Moving forward with football is risky ... could it be the right call?

When you’re going through hell, the old adage reads, keep going.

That appears to be the motto being used by the ACC and SEC, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the sports landscape.

Positive tests? We move forward.

Player opt outs? We move forward.

Potential non-conference foes drop out? We move forward.

Now, it appears the Big Ten and Pac-12 are calling it, flatlining their seasons on August 10, mere days after full-squad practices began, a decision that appears to be driven more out of fear of the players organizing a union than any new defeats in the battle against the virus.

That should have done it. With those two conferences falling, clearly, the rest of the sport would soon follow.

However, ACC commissioner John has shown in his two decades at the helm that he prefers chess to dominoes, and he sees steadfast in his determination.

We move forward.

Will it work? Maybe not. Maybe teams will get hit with a rash of positive tests. Maybe it’s just not feasible to play a full season of a sport as tightly quartered as football. But Swofford and his counterparts in the SEC are going to go down trying.

Here’s the thing: They may not be wrong.

The ACC announced its revised scheduling model the week before last, ironically on the same day that it appeared MLB’s 60-game experiment was about to fail. The Cardinals had just become the second team to have an outbreak of positive tests. Schedules were scrambled. The outlook was bleak. More teams were sure to follow.

Playing without a bubble was infeasible, critics charged. The travel made it impossible to continue.

And yet, MLB played on. Two weeks later, (apart from the Cardinals) they’re still playing. The season is now a third over, and successful completion of the season, while not assured, is at least in sight.

Perhaps the ACC and SEC can hold fall seasons, battling through the potholes and intense criticism sure to come. Perhaps, in December, Clemson and Alabama emerge as undefeated league champions and play in a New Year’s title game watched by the nation.

Perhaps the rest of the country plays football in spring, with Penn State and Oregon winning the Big Ten and Pac-12 respectively. They then play each other in a spring title game.

What then? Well, then we have Clemson and Penn State square off in a June game, dubbed The Playoff For All Seasons.

It could happen, and it could work to the extent that it all seemed planned out.

So the ACC and SEC move forward, borrowing a phrase from their players: "Let us try."

Times are tough, the future uncertain. We can wait and hope things are better in a few months, or we can push forward and try to overcome the obstacles now. Both are valid decisions, and there’s no reason college football needs to choose only one.

The ACC and SEC play on.

Whether they’re like the tortoise in the race against the hare or the band on the Titanic remains to be seen.