College football has time to avoid mess

ATLANTA — Well, it was fun while it lasted.

After a few seasons of relative sanity, where we could all look forward to a legitimate playoff system for determining the national champion and weren’t distracted by the musical chairs of schools bouncing from one conference to another, college football is headed for a mess of a season.

Or, dare we say, two seasons. Nearly half of the schools in the sport’s top group, known as the Football Bowl Subdivision, have put off any attempt at playing until after the first of the year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The others, including the mighty SEC, are determined to press on in the fall even though covid-19 is spiking in many of their states.

Speaking for all of us, Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez summed it up best.

“This has really been a hard stretch for me,” he said. “I go to bed every night, and my body just aches because I’m dealing with this.”

If each side sticks to this ludicrous path, we’re going to have two seasons that essentially mean nothing, leaving us to long for those years when we had split national champions that at least followed the same calendar.

The Big Ten and Pac-12, which are part of the Power 5 conferences that essentially run the sport, have bailed on their fall seasons but hope to get back on the field in the early months of 2021. Two leagues from the Group of Five, the Mid-American and Mountain West, have gone the same route, as have several individual schools.

At last count, 53 of the FBS’ 130 schools have pushed back the start of their seasons until after New Year’s Day, which was long the traditional end to the college football year.

Meanwhile, the SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 are sticking with their plans for a fall season, though all have made major revisions to their schedules in hopes of getting to the finish line ahead of a virus that already has claimed nearly 170,000 American lives. The other FBS leagues — Conference USA, the American Athletic and the Sun Belt — have chosen that path as well.

This is all madness, of course, but absolutely on brand for a multi-billion-dollar sport that essentially operates outside the purview of the NCAA, the highly flawed organization that governs the rest of college athletics.

Even though everyone in FBS vowed months ago to work together to deal with the enormous challenge of playing a high-contact sport in the middle of a raging pandemic, it soon became apparent that each conference would choose the path that suited its own interests. No surprise there.

“It’s going to take some time to heal,” said Ryan Day, coach of Big Ten powerhouse Ohio State “But if we put one foot in front of the other, we’re going to get going again.”

Looming above it all is the virus, which could ruin the best-laid plans.

“We’ve got to make sure we’ve got this virus under control before you talk about a spring season,” said Jimmy Lake, coach of the Pac-12’s Washington Huskies.

There are certainly drawbacks to any spring plan, such as many top players opting out to begin focusing on the NFL Draft.

But everyone must recognize there is no perfect solution in this very imperfect world we’re living in at the moment.

“I just want to play football, whenever that time may be,” said Skylar Thompson, the senior quarterback at Big 12 Kansas State. “I just want to get the ball in my hands and go compete one last time.”

For Thompson and others to have any shot at a season that doesn’t require a giant asterisk — or even worse, gets halted before it’s done — everyone has to be prepared to give a little, maybe a lot.

There’s still time to make it work.