Inside the Conversation Around College Football’s Return

SI asked the game's 11 most important decision-makers about the fate of the 2020 season. Their answers suggest everything's still on the table.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Last week, the NFL unveiled a full, 16-game schedule with some built-in flexibility to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, the college conference commissioners are wrestling with how to save the sport that is the heart beat of so many campuses and provides much of the funding that fuels the schools’ other sports.

In today’s SI.com Daily Cover story, Ross Dellinger and Pat Forde write, “Commissioners from the Power 5 conferences—Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, ACC and SEC—have met over conference calls each day for more than two months, they say, and those from the Group of Five talk at least once each week. As a full group of 10, they hold bi-weekly meetings. At its core, they’re attempting to salvage college athletics—namely their cash cow, the billion-dollar industry of football—amid a national shutdown. To date, there are more questions than answers. “I feel like I’m at Grand Central Station,” says Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson, “and there are 10 trains leaving in different directions, and we don't know which one to get on.”

Dellinger and Forde posed nine key questions to college commissioners. The first is the most important: Who’s going to make the decision to restart on-campus training? Those decisions, of course, start with the state governors and flow to the college presidents.

“We’re hopeful the governors have a consensus reached so you don’t have a situation where you have football in Texas but not in California. Or you have it in Michigan but don’t have it in Pennsylvania. And that’s a definite possibility at this point,” American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said. “I think the NCAA Board [of Governors] will have a huge say in what we’re doing and they’ll take the best medical advice. I think there will be national guidance from the Board and the Board may leave it up to conferences about certain things, but say there are serious health issues and serious concerns about safety, the Board might say, ‘We don’t feel we can go ahead.’ At that point, I’m not sure any conference will necessarily go off on its own.”

For more questions to this answer and other critical questions, read the SI.com Daily Cover story.