Plans float on sports’ uncertain start dates

The trial balloons appear in quick succession now, with a flurry going up almost every day. Each of them is meant to gauge public response, and each of them carries a new plan for salvaging a season or restarting a league.

It’s a wonder that a few of them ever get off the ground at all. Some outlandish ones hail from fantasy worlds. Some directly contradict each other. And some look like they must have been designed to crash all along.

A UFC fighter testing positive for coronavirus the same week the organization was scheduled to host the first major United States sports event since the pandemic shut everything down? Who could have seen that coming?

Still, new proposals keep being floated, because power brokers keep changing their minds about how much revenue they’re willing to sacrifice, and how much risk they’re willing to stomach.

Less than four weeks ago, speaking to CBS Sports about a conference call college sports leaders had with Vice President Mike Pence, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby declared: “Our players are students.”

“If we’re not in college, we’re not having contests,” Bowlsby said April 15. “Our message was, we need to get universities and colleges back open, that we were education-based programs, and we weren’t going to have sports until we had something closer to normal college going on.”

Most reasonable people agreed with the sentiment. That trial balloon flew just fine.

But as more colleges have been bracing for the idea of online-only classes this fall, Bowlsby has changed his tone. And this week, when asked by Sports Illustrated if in-person classes will be a prerequisite for football to return to campuses, he said: “No.”

“I suspect some institutions may be a hundred percent online,” Bowlsby told West Virginia Metro News on Thursday. “And if they are, and if that is also what student-athletes are doing, I think that meets the criteria (for

football).”

That balloon drew some attention, of course, in no small part because it flew in the face of what NCAA president Mark Emmert said about the same issue one day later.

“If a school doesn’t reopen, then they’re not going to be playing sports,” Emmert said Friday during an NCAA livestream. “It’s that simple.”

One obvious reason for the mixed messages here is that nobody is in charge of college football — or, more accurately, lots of people are. The sport doesn’t have a commissioner or an official championship, and the conferences put together the playoff on their own, without the NCAA. If, say, the Southeastern Conference wants to play its schedule this September and the Pac-12 doesn’t, nothing is stopping the SEC from going it alone.

But sometimes trial balloons can collide even within individual school districts, like they did this week after an interview conducted by the Express-News editorial board. When San Antonio Independent School District superintendent Pedro Martinez was asked a question about the return of high school football, he acknowledged that the decision would be made by the University Interscholastic League but said his opinion was “we’re not going to have any (contact sports) for at least the first semester.”

Within a couple of days, SAISD’s own athletic director, Todd Howey, released a video in which he said: “We are obviously pending direction from the UIL, but as of today, we fully intend to play football, run cross country and play volleyball this fall.”

If it seems like nobody knows anything for sure, that’s because nobody does. But a lack of certainty only encourages more trial balloons, as every league finds a way to leak ideas about how they can return to action. Some are realistic. Some are far-fetched. All of them get reported, because there are no games to cover, and that is how we’ve heard serious discussions about playing an entire Major League Baseball season in Arizona and the remainder of the NBA schedule in Las Vegas.

If those balloons go up, somebody’s going to talk about them.

In the past few days, each of the big three American sports leagues sent out signs indicating they’re planning returns. Per ESPN, the NFL distributed a memo to all 32 teams laying out protocols for a gradual reopening that would begin May 15.

The MLB reportedly is hoping to restart spring training by mid-June, with a season opener in early July.

The NBA allowed teams to reopen their practice facilities on a limited basis Friday, although the Spurs were among a long list of teams that elected not to do so.

At least that league is trying to be realistic. In a conference call with players Friday, commissioner Adam Silver reportedly acknowledged that no decision regarding completing this season needs to be made before June, and that there are no guarantees fans will be in the stands next season.

And when Silver told players, per a recording of the call acquired by ESPN, that “this could turn out to be the single greatest challenge of all our lives?”

Somehow, that didn’t seem like a mere trial balloon.