What the NFL Schedule Contingency Plans Can Tell Us About College Football this Fall
It's business as usual – the National Football League released their 2020 schedule on Thursday night.
For the most part, it looks like a normal NFL schedule structure. The big takeaway from the schedule release might just be that the league believes they can play football post-coronavirus and that they can play a normal season.
Essentially, they released a normal schedule as if we're not living in this world in which things change seemingly daily.
However, this seemingly normal schedule has some COVID-19 contingencies built in, according to reports on Thursday evening by ESPN's Adam Schefter. Those contingencies are as follows:
- If the season is delayed, early weeks could occur following week 17
- The Super Bowl could be pushed back weeks (or even months)
- The Pro Bowl could be dropped to allow for an additional week
- Any week can serve as opening week
- Every team shares the same bye week as their week two opponent
Previous reports had read that the league would play only AFC vs NFC matchups for the first few weeks of the season, in case they had to chop that off. That didn't happen. Honestly, there's not a ton of contingencies built within the weekly schedule itself.
With opening night slated for Thursday, Sept. 10, the league could push all week one games to become an essential week 18 if it is deemed not safe to open the season on Sept. 10.
These contingencies give us a way to see how leagues are thinking. Sure, the NFL and NCAA operate completely independently and make completely different sets of decisions. Even different NCAA leagues and conferences could make separate sets of decisions when it comes to returning to the sporting fields.
In theory, the NFL could play a season where the NCAA does not. That just seems incredibly unlikely. What seems more likely is that the NCAA decision makers either a) think similarly to those NFL decision makers, b) will look at the NFL decisions and make their own with the NFL being a major influence, or c) a healthy combination of both a and b.
Therefore, it's a safe assumption that these NFL contingency plans can give us an insight into what college football may look like this fall.
Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, hasn't ruled out playing only SEC conference games for the 2020 season if no other conferences decide to play. Yes, there's a theoretical world where the SEC and the SEC alone could play college football. That said, Sankey iterated that college football as a whole is better off moving forward unified.
So more likely than the SEC moving forward solo, cancelling all non-conference games, is that we could see a world where non-conference games were pushed back and tacked on to the end of the schedule, similar to the NFL's contingency. Maybe instead of playing Baylor on Sept. 5, Ole Miss will play Baylor on Dec. 5, the week following the Egg Bowl.
Obviously, for decisions like this to be made would require not just logistical hurdles, but also the consent of both schools and both schools' conferences. Tacking games on the end of the schedule would also likely necessitate the postponement of the bowl season and the playoff. That sounds crazy on the surface, but if the NFL is putting a Super Bowl postponement on the table, anything is possible.
The NFL listed all games as home and away, something that implies teams will be able to safely travel the country. They've never seriously talked about relocating to smaller stadiums, even if the league is to play games without fan attendance.
It's something that's also been iterated by Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter, emphasizing that there have been no talks of moving the Ole Miss game vs. Baylor to a site outside of Houston's NRG Stadium.
Will there be fans at games? The University of South Carolina athletics director Ray Tanner recently said that social distancing will be part of the fan experience at the school when football comes back in the fall. They're currently working through models as to how that will happen.
All signs push towards football being played in the fall. It may be a different experience, it may be in an empty stadium and it may not happen in the dates pre-set on calendars, but it seems like we're going to have some football. In whatever contingencies we need, most will be happy with just the broad return of the sport.
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