College Football Still Does Not Have Much Clarity on Its 2020 Season, But Concrete Answers Could Be Coming In June or July

SI's Pat Forde and Ross Dellenger met with the 11 people in charge of what the 2020 college football season will look like, the conference commissioners of the football bowl subdivision conferences. Pat Forde shares some insight into their conversation with these people and what they had to say about college football heading into the 2020 season.

Video Transcript:

My colleague Ross Dellenger and I got together the eleven people who are going to make the most impact on the decision of whether or not college football gets played, gets played on time, gets played in front of fans and who all participates in the 2020 season. Those are the conference commissioners of the football bowl subdivision conferences. Ten of those people, plus at Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. They also form the College Football Playoff Steering Committee. What we got from them is interests that are all over the map.

Quite frankly, nobody knows yet where things are headed and in what form or fashion in terms of a timetable. For the most part, we're looking at probably June 15th to July 1st before we get ironclad decisions on what time football will start being practiced, when it will be played, what time games will go, if they will go, when and where. So much still up in the air was really interesting to get the comments from the leaders of the Big Ten, the SEC, the ACC, the Pac-12, the American Athletic Conference and so on, and just put their minds together.

They've never dealt with anything like this. None of us really have. And so there's no playbook, so to speak, as Larry Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, said for how it will be approached. But testing obviously will be key.

Just the general overall thoughts from governors, from university presidents, whether they want to have students on their campuses on time. And then I think basically what we're heading towards is a solution of: People really want to play football in the fall, but how many fans can be there to watch it? I anticipate or predict that we will have college football probably in September, maybe on Labor Day weekend, the traditional opening weekend of the season. But then it's just a question of who's there to watch it and where we go from there. If things if there's a flare up three weeks into the season, is the whole thing called off? Just a lot of unknowns still. But good information on SI now from the eleven people who are most in charge of college football going forward.