Leagues going it alone in ’20

Plans for the college football season — if it is played — should start coming into focus this week.

They will trickle down from the top of major college football, with Power Five conferences putting in place revised schedules they hope will make it easier to manage potential disruptions brought on by COVID-19.

The Power Five commissioners talked a lot in the spring about the importance of collaboration and trying to launch the season together, with all of the Football Bowl Subdivision acting in unison. The way things are heading, that appears to be out the window.

Here’s where each conference stands with the first scheduled college football games about a month away.

ACC

The ACC is looking at an 11game schedule that would include 10 conference games and start Sept. 12. The headline-grabber is that Notre Dame, which normally plays five or six ACC teams per season, could be a full conference member for this season. The Fighting Irish have never played in a football conference before. That still needs to be worked out and other models are still being considered, including one with eight conference games and one nonconference.

BIG TEN

The first conference to announce it would play only conference games. The assumption/ speculation has been that the Big Ten would add another game to its existing nine-game schedule to get to 10 and have that in place before the end of July, but the conference has been typically coy about when it will reveal its plans.

BIG 12

The Big 12 has been the conference most publicly determined to try to play all its games. “We decided a long time ago that if we were going to go away from our regular schedule that we would need to be forced into it by the circumstances, by the situation that was there,” Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said. “And so far we haven’t been forced into it.”

Instead of delaying the start of the season, the Big 12 is taking the opposite approach, moving the start up to create more open dates for potential makeup games. Kansas has scheduled Southern Illinois (a replacement for another Football Championship Subdivision school) for Aug. 29. Oklahoma also pushed its game against Missouri State to the so-called Week

Zero. There have been reports that TCU will play on Aug. 29 against UNLV in the first game at the new NFL stadium in Las Vegas. Both the Horned Frogs and Rebels had games against California canceled when the Pac-12 scrapped nonconference games.

The Pac-12 went conference-only a couple of days after the Big Ten, but it said it would deliver a new schedule by July 31. The San Jose Mercury News reported last week the Pac-12 is expected to go with 10 games and start on Sept. 19. That kickoff date could be moved back as far as Oct. 3 if state restrictions enacted to stem spikes in COVID-19 cases force Pac-12 teams to delay the start of preseason practice.

SEC athletic directors left an in-person meeting with Commissioner Greg Sankey in Birmingham, Alabama, a couple of weeks ago with a few scheduling models on the table. Conference-only games never made sense for the SEC (or the ACC and Big 12).

Why prevent Georgia, Florida, Kentucky and South Carolina from playing in-state ACC rivals? Auburn also is scheduled to play North Carolina from the ACC in Atlanta. The SEC could add a conference game to its eightgame slate. There has also been talk within the league of letting teams play as many nonconference games as they can to try to get as close as possible to a full 12-game season. The Big 12 is taking this approach, too. The SEC’s final decision could linger into next week.