It's looking like no college football this fall

This would normally be the time of year where I begin to think about the coming football season: I begin looking for the preview magazines in the stores, I spend more time reading discussions on University of Houston athletics message boards, and I even begin thinking about tailgating menus. However, I'm not doing any of that right now. Absent a miracle between now and the scheduled beginning of the season seven weeks from now, I'm not expecting there to be any college football in 2020.

Yahoo! Sports columnist Pete Thamel is a hack who is rarely correct, but I have a suspicion that this may be one of the few times he's right:

Take a deep breath, and begin to get comfortable with the idea there’s virtually no chance of playing college football in any recognizable form this fall. Start digesting the notion that the next time we see a college football game could be in more than 13 months, as the sport remains the most unlikely of all the major sports to execute a successful return. Consider any semblance of college football prior to Week Zero of 2021 as a bonus, an improbable gift from the football gods. 

With the MLS struggling in a supposed bubble, MLB officials botching the testing portion of its return and an increasing amount of pessimism about the prospect of an NFL season, only a medical miracle can save college football this fall. 

“Right now, I don’t see a path in the current environment to how we play,” said a Power Five athletic director. “I’m confident we’ll get back to what we all think of as normal, but it may be a year before that happens.” 

Here’s the cruel truth about how college football leaders approached football this fall: The entirety of their plan to return was based on hope. Hope that the COVID-19 would go away. Hope that college campuses wouldn’t be a petri dish for the virus. Hope that they could figure out a way to play a contact sport in a time of mandatory social distancing. Hope for a vaccine to keep players healthy and seats full. 

A strategy of hope isn’t much of a strategy, and a half-dozen coaches and officials told Yahoo Sports this weekend that hope is being vanquished. It’s all over in the minds of many coaches and athletic directors, as the sport will keep pushing back to buy time until the inevitable happens. 

“Ultimately, no one is playing football in the fall,” said a high-ranking college official. “It’s just a matter of how it unfolds. As soon one of the ‘autonomy five’ or Power Five conferences makes a decision, that’s going to end it.”

In order for college football to happen, we would need to be moving past the coronavirus pandemic right now. But that's not happening: the current wave of infections is easily surpassing what we witnessed in the spring, and that's not a trend that is going to improve anytime soon. States are going back into quarantines and movement restrictions, and it's unclear if universities will even risk holding in-person classes this fall. No students on campus, no sports.

Even if the games could be held this fall, they would likely have to be done so with few, if any, spectators in the stands. That might be feasible for a handful of schools who get a large amount of revenue from television contracts. It would, however, be a financial disaster for most others, especially "Group of Five" institutions such as Houston. And even the schools in the best financial position don't want to assume the legal and medical liability they could incur should a student-athlete become gravely ill:

The worry among coaches remains the same: Are we really going to keep pushing forward with the season and wait until there’s a player hooked up to a ventilator in an ICU and have that become the sport’s Rudy Gobert shutdown moment? Luckily so far – from Clemson to Texas to North Carolina, among those we know about – there have been no known hospitalizations among the college football players who’ve tested positive. But coaches remain concerned that players with pre-existing conditions like sickle cell trait could be at increased risk. 

With at least two Power Five conferences - the Big Ten and the PAC-12, announcing a switch to conference-only schedules, the snowball is already rolling downhill. The next step, I predict, will be for conferences to delay the start of the season until mid-October. Then they'll delay until the spring
of 2021. Then, they'll cancel the season altogether.

It's going to suck for everyone: the fans, the students, the coaches, and especially the players. In American culture, fall and football are synonymous. It's going to feel very empty to have one without the other.

But until we get a handle on the Coronavirus, this is where we are.