COVID-19 might give UTC an undefeated season

An undefeated season. Over the 112 years that the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has fielded a football team — including all those seasons when the Mocs were known simply as the University of Chattanooga — the school has never previously won every game on its schedule.

They have had one perfect season, if you want to call it that. A perfectly awful one in 1907. Six games. Six losses. Not one other time, before or since, have the Mocs lost them all.

But come October 24th in Bowling Green, Kentucky, UTC can make history. Beat the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers that day and the Mocs will officially end the 2020 season without a defeat.

Of course, lose to the fast-rising Football Bowl Subdivision program — the Hilltoppers won 45-19 at Arkansas last November on their way to a 9-4 season — and UTC will post its second winless season ever.

Ah, the coronavirus pandemic giveth and it taketh away.

OK, so this is all but certain to be a college football season we’ll all want to forget, even the big boys in the Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Southeastern conferences, the ones determined to ignore COVID-19 in order to honor their lucrative television contracts and fill their massive stadiums to 25 percent of capacity.

Sure, someone will supposedly be crowned national champ if those three power conferences are allowed to complete their altered seasons and stage a playoff of some sort. And as it pertains to the SEC, if you can play a 10-game season against league teams only and go on to win a championship, you deserve a national title, regardless of which programs didn’t have seasons because of the coronavirus. (Sorry, Ohio State.)

But if you’re the Mocs, this one-game schedule the school announced Monday could prove to be a pretty big deal for years to come

beyond that $350,000 check they’ll get just for showing up at WKU.

Not only can you claim that undefeated season, you can also post a fairly impressive win against an FBS program that’s no slouch. Beyond that, it could be a huge momentum builder for next season, when Rusty Wright’s third UTC team just might have what it takes to make a deep playoff run at the Football Championship Subdivision level.

The bigger question in all this is why every other school whose conference seasons have been canceled doesn’t do the same.

One game.

One game only. Forget what the Big Ten says about not playing a schedule this fall. Why don’t Ohio State and Michigan play each other anyway and dare the league to do something about it. They could even call it a scrimmage. Think ESPN wouldn’t jump at the chance to televise that, um, scrimmage?

But why stop there? UCLA and USC could play. Washington and Washington State. Arizona and Arizona State. Cal and Stanford. Michigan State and Penn State.

And if, heaven help us, the SEC ultimately cancels its season, we could still have the Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn.

Remember what Wright said in Monday’s UTC press release about the Mocs’ one-game season? Something about, “We will have a fall camp leading up to the game and treat it like spring practice. (But) instead of having a scrimmage at the end like we do in the spring, our guys will have a chance to compete against a quality FBS opponent”?

Well, that’s what every school who thought they weren’t going to have a season should do. And if they catch COVID-19, hey, the coaches and athletes are all convinced that’s no big deal anyway. So go for it. One game against a quality FBS opponent. Or one scrimmage, if they’d prefer to call it that. Doesn’t matter. Just. Do. It.

But in UTC’s case, it could also become the first undefeated season in school history. And you thought nothing good could ever come from a season shortened by the coronavirus.