Penn State Pivots to 'Winter' Football Season
Penn State is squarely behind an alternate 2020 football season, which athletic director Sandy Barbour said is "absolutely" viable.
Just don't call it a spring season. More like a spring semester season. Or, as coach James Franklin explained, a winter season.
Franklin, among the first coaches to publicly endorse playing games in midwestern domed stadiums, said he backs the idea of an alternate season as long as it begins early enough to avoid disrupting the 2021 fall season.
"I think it needs to be more if a winter season than a spring season," Franklin said. "The later you go into the year, that’s going to start to impact the following season. It’s going to have an impact on that in terms of too many games in too short a period of time, in terms of injury, in terms of guys getting healthy for injury prevention for the right amount of training that we have to do beforehand to be ready to compete."
Franklin serves on a Big Ten task force that is evaluating winter/spring models for fall sports competition. Sports Illustrated reported that the Big Ten is exploring an eight-game schedule beginning in January that could use domed stadiums in Minneapolis, Detroit and Indianapolis, among others. The modified season would wrap itself around the NFL playoffs.
Barbour said she expects the Big Ten to release more details possibly within a week.
"Obviously a lot has to be done in terms of dottings the Is and crossing the Ts, but we've put something together that I think is very compelling and that our student-athletes and our fans and our communities will be pretty interested in," Barbour said.
What would a winter Penn State roster look like? Franklin wasn't prepared yet to address opt-outs, which likely would count multiple seniors, but did say that the NFL's collective bargaining agreement provides an option to reschedule the NFL combine and draft.
Regarding eligibility, the NCAA Division I Council recommended that athletes receive both an extra year of eligibility and another year to use it. Further, the Division I Council said, athletes who use their additional year should not count against team roster limits.
That was among the many questions that led Franklin to say he was "extremely frustrated" with how the Big Ten announced its decision to postpone fall sports before providing answers.
"How are you going to handle rosters? How many guys are going to end up playing, and how many aren't going to end up playing based on opting out?" Franklin asked. "... All of these things have got to be tied together to make it work effectively and efficiently for as many as possible."
Ultimately, Franklin said, a winter season shouldn't disrupt the 2021 fall season, which the coach wants to operate as normally as possible. If the Big Ten is playing a shorter 2021 season than other conferences, the national college football scene might be unbalanced until at least 2022.
That has ripple effects with not only competition but also recruiting.
"I've got to try to work as hard as I can to create a new picture that looks as close to the old picture as we possibly can, but do it in a way that has the least impact moving forward on 2021," Franklin said. "... We want to try to get the picture back to as normal as we possibly can."
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