Spring season another twist
Potential historic slate prompts lots of questions
Back in April, not long after the NCAA basketball tournaments were canceled because of the pandemic, the idea of moving the college football season to the spring of 2021 already was being tossed around.
Conference commissioners and athletic directors called it a last resort. And when it looked like the fight against the coronavirus might be going well, the idea mostly fell by the wayside.
“We broached it very little in our AD meetings and really haven’t gotten serious about it at all,” Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez recalled Tuesday. “I had one AD from another league call and just talk about it a little bit.”
Time to start talking about it a lot. The Big Ten and Pac-12 postponed fall football this week, hoping to salvage a spring season like the Mid-American Conference and Mountain West plan to do.
What that looks like is anybody’s guess, but officials will need to figure out everything from how to prepare in the fall to how much to play in the spring, where in the calendar it could fit and who exactly is going to be suiting up for these teams.
Before a spring football season is planned, Wisconsin coach Paul Chryst said, there has to be a discussion about next fall, too.
“I think the two have to be tied together. In my mind, we’ve made the decision and we’ve canceled the 2020 season,” Chryst said. “Now how do we want to do 2021?”
Todd Berry, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association and a member of the NCAA’s football oversight committee, said conversations about a spring football season have been minimal. There has been a theme: “We would all like to go into next fall with some kind of normalcy.”
Ohio State coach Ryan Day was clear on what he wanted.
“I think starting the first week of January would be the best way to go and an eight-week season,” he said.
Chryst coached in what was known at the time as the World League of American Football and later become NFL Europe. Occasionally players from that spring league would end up on NFL rosters the following fall.
“It’s a long season,” Chryst said. Former NCAA executive and college football player Mark Lewis said playing two full seasons or even close to that should be a nonstarter.
“If you look back to the last 20 years of college football, there’s been a de-emphasis of spring activity, spring practice, the number of days you can practice, the number of days you can practice with pads, the number of contact practices you can have,” he said. “All those have been reduced with purpose.”
“What are you gaining by playing in spring if you’re trying to add more games?” Lewis said. “I don’t think that’s necessarily a good idea.”
Exactly when a season could be played in the spring is likely to be determined, like many things, by the virus.
“I don’t think there’s a single indication that there could be a better situation in March, April and May then in September, October, November,” Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said.