While most schools and conferences have opted out of the fall season and the NCAA has cancelled its fall championships, this fall won't be entirely without college sports. The "Stubborn Six," as Sports Illustrated has dubbed them, will proceed with football as planned. And, for better or worse, the other fall sports are along for the ride.
Whether these are smart decisions or not is an entirely different conversation. The bottom line is that they were made, and they were made because of football. However, since they can't compete in only football (as much as some of them may want to), the other sports must play, too. So, once they committed to football, they committed to soccer, cross country, volleyball and field hockey as well. And, while we can continue to debate the wisdom of it, playing those non-football fall sports could end up being helpful for the NCAA.
The NCAA is currently trying to figure out the start date for basketball. There are several options on the table, but we do know that there will definitely be a college basketball season. The NCAA simply can't afford to not have one. The cancellation of March Madness this year left everyone in a tremendous financial hole that will take a while to climb out of. That's why cancelling again in 2021 is not an option. Some schools would never recover.
All the schools that are sitting out the fall know this too. They're all planning on playing basketball, most likely starting in January. And that's where the championship-less fall season comes into play. Because how successful these schools are in pulling off the fall will go a long way towards showing everybody else if it is indeed safe to return to competition.
Every team that's back on campus and scheduled to compete this fall has to follow the same protocols that the NCAA set out earlier this summer. Everything was spelled out, from the number of people who can practice at one time to mask and social distancing requirements to the amount of testing that needs to be done, and conferences have added their own guidelines.
Those protocols will likely still be in place when everybody else returns to practice and competition, whether that be October, January or even later. That's obviously going to be a massive change. However, while it will be different, it won't be completely foreign. The schools that are competing this fall will have had an entire season of doing it, so everyone will get to see what works and what doesn't under the new guidelines.
Likewise, we'll see how well the guidelines work. If these fall sports are able to get off the ground and there are little to no positive tests, it'll give everyone else far less trepidation about resuming their own athletic seasons. Granted, some sports lend themselves better to social distancing than others. But there's a mix of contact (football) and non-contact (cross country) sports being contested, so it'll also give everyone else an idea whether there's any difference in positivity rate.
There would be no way to know these things without teams competing in the fall to test the protocols. And it would be entirely understandable to be concerned about going into a return to play completely blind. Nobody has played since mid-March, and the last thing anyone wants is what happened last year to happen again. It's better to be cautious than jump in too early. Knowing how well those protocols work will certainly ease some of those fears.
You also have to give a lot of credit to the student-athletes on the volleyball and soccer and field hockey and cross country teams that will take the field this fall. This will obviously be the strangest season of their lives. Just like football players, they're able to opt out if they have COVID concerns, but even still, they're the guinea pigs in all of this. While many schools aren't competing this fall, they are. A good number of them may want to, but some may not. Especially since they're seeing how many schools and conferences aren't playing.
Needless to say, this isn't what they signed up for. The NCAA hasn't say one way or the other whether it'll hold championships in the fall sports. That will likely depend on how many schools move their season to the spring. Either way, these teams are competing this fall with no NCAA Championship at stake.
They also have no idea what it means for them if their team plays its regular fall season, but the NCAA does hold championships in the spring. Will they still be eligible? How will they qualify? How would it affect their performance to have their regular season in the fall, but the championships won't be until months later? Yet, despite all these unanswered questions, they're playing anyway.
It may be premature to say these fall seasons could be for nothing, though. I give the conferences and sports that are still competing a lot of credit for looking for ways to make the season meaningful. There will still be conference championships, obviously, but coaches in different sports have come together to discuss some type of interconference postseason tournament. It wouldn't be NCAA-sanctioned, but it would still give that postseason feeling. And, who knows?, maybe such an event could become a regular feature moving forward.
College sports as we know them came to a grinding halt in March. When everything was shut down and all NCAA Championships were cancelled, the hope was that things would be back to normal by the fall. That obviously isn't the case. As it turns out the earliest possible date for "back to normal" is January 2021, and it may even be longer than that.
There are a handful of schools and conferences that felt they were ready to come back right away, though. And we should be thankful that, despite everything, they're competing this fall. Because they're the ones taking the risk. And, by doing so, they're leaving the blueprint for everybody else to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment