Brace Yourself for the Craziest Week in the History of College Football
Conferences making secret alliances, talk of teams jumping conferences mid-season and potentially a full-on unionization of NCAA football players.
A quick browse through college football Twitter on Monday morning will pull up all of those sub-topics and many more.
While nobody was expecting a normal football season in 2020, the last 24-48 hours have taken what was already looking odd and thrown it into overdrive.
The sport known for honoring tradition and progressing at a snail's pace has been ripe with numerous rumors after an emergency meeting between the Power 5 conferences on Sunday.
It appears from all reports being made that the Big Ten is on the cusp of canceling its season, or at least moving to push football into the spring of 2021. The Pac-12 may be close behind with a similar decision.
Meanwhile both the ACC and SEC appear to be making an attempt to keep football in the fall of 2020, showing little to no interest in canceling or postponing.
That leaves the Big 12, which appears to be stuck in the middle of the debate. Conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby talked with the Des Moines Register about the possibility of cancelling the 2020 season.
I've literally been on dozens of calls with doctors and scientists and no one has told us to stop. We'll keep trying to move ahead, although it would be less than forthright to sit here and not add that the last 30 days have not gone the way we would like. That has to be factored into the process. We've probably not made progress, but we've had no one tell us to shut it down.
Bowlsby and his staff are still working on releasing a Big 12 conference schedule later this week, indicating that a decision to cancel isn't coming anytime soon.
As if a Game of Thrones-style political alliance wasn't enough for you to digest on a Monday morning, there's plenty more going on.
Both the official Ohio State and Michigan Twitter accounts came out in protest of a potential cancellation from the Big Ten. Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh released a statement that seems to criticize the decision of his own university's president (or in other words, boss).
Let's put a pin in that for now though. Because we are far from done.
Things got more insane as the morning progressed with several (extremely unconfirmed) reports that some Big Ten schools were looking into joining the Big 12 for a season should their conference cancel football.
There were even crazier talks of the SEC courting Oklahoma and Texas should the Big 12 cancel football.
While the previous rumor bordered on ridiculous, there's no denying the validity of the #wewanttoplay movement that began to surface on social media Sunday night and into Monday morning.
College football players began tweeting out this banner with the aforementioned hashtag.
That hashtag seemed to merge with #weareunited restarting talks of a potential college football players union down the road, something that would clearly have implications reaching much further than just this season.
“Moving forward, what we really want to be able to create is a legitimate voice for the athletes in these major conferences,” Cal offensive lineman Valentino Daltoso told Sports Illustrated on Sunday. Daltoso was one of the players who helped coordinate the Pac-12’s “#WeAreUnited” movement earlier this month.
From SI:
According to Daltoso, a large network had already been created after he and others had been in contact with players from other conferences in the days immediately following the Pac-12 group’s announcement. Players in the Big Ten announced on Aug. 5 their own dissatisfaction with the lack of pandemic plan by the NCAA, adding the conference needs to include player input before making their own proposal. Communication among college football players was already occurring at a national level when the “We Want To Play” hashtag began populating social media Sunday, seemingly as a response to players who were threatening to opt out. Daltoso said players from across all Power 5 conferences took part in multiple calls over the weekend and realized they were on the same page. The final push came from a Zoom call Sunday night with a couple representatives from each conference.
Still following along? Well as of this writing it's only 12:30 p.m. on Monday morning and this already qualifies as one of the craziest weeks in college football history. With everything that is set to go down and what will likely be a few surprises along the way, it's safe to say it could move to the top of the list by week's end.
