MW BOSS THINKING OF EVERY SCENARIO
Football games in spring a possibility to get season played
Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson has a thick, robust head of hair that he gets cut monthly. With coronavirus shutdowns including barber shops, he was going on eight weeks when he furtively went to visit the conference’s director of communications, whose wife is a former hairdresser.
“Hats don’t get it done,” Thompson said on a Las
Vegas radio station earlier this week. “I did sneak over there. I broke the law. … I did get a little trim.”
The real haircut, though, is yet to come. The one for his 12-member conference.
“Let’s be frank,” Thompson told the Union-tribune in a wide-ranging interview. “The revenue is going to be really different, whether that’s if we get our full distribution from television, the ticket revenue, the boosters, etc. It’s going to be different, there’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. The model we’ve operated under for years is going to change.
“We’re doing the best that we can. We’ve got some really experienced, bright, insightful people dealing with a bad hand.”
Thompson and his athletic directors meet by video conference two or three times per week, working through scenarios that change daily, even hourly. But most conversations start and end with football — which provides an estimated 85 percent of their revenues — and whether it can be played starting Aug. 29 or some other time during the 2020-21 academic year. Or at all.
A Stadium poll of 114 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) athletic directors released this week found that 99 percent think there will be some sort of season. Fortyone percent predicted it would be a 12-game schedule with a delayed start in October or November, compared with 24 percent believing the normal schedule will hold.
Thompson skewed more toward the 20 percent forecasting a shortened season — maybe conference games only — in the late fall or the 11 percent expecting a 12-game season in the spring of 2021.
“Until we have more answers from a medical per
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spective and our governments, and from our universities in general as to what can happen and what can’t happen,” the commissioner said, “the spring possibility makes more sense. But I certainly haven’t given up that we won’t be playing football on Labor Day weekend. It appears that that’s not the most likely scenario, but it’s not eliminated at this point.
“One of the worst outcomes is we get back too soon, we rush in, people are feeling good, the economy is coming back … and we have a reset in the fall.”
Moving to spring might be more palatable to athletic directors knowing a big chunk of their budgets come from ticket revenue and thinking they’d have a better chance at attracting fans in April (when there might be a vaccine) than September (when there won’t).
But it might be less amenable to television partners who already have content in the spring and need to fill time slots in the fall, even if there are no fans in the stands.
The Mountain West recently agreed to a new, sixyear TV contract with CBS and Fox that is worth nearly triple the $1.1 million schools received annually from the previous one. It’s supposed to start July 1, with each network airing 25 football games per year.
Thompson offered this scenario: “Television might say, ‘If you decide to play in the spring, I can’t do 25 Mountain West football games. I can only do 10. And you’ve given me 10 Fridays. I need 10 Thursdays because I can’t squeeze you in on (other days). And by the way, the rights fee might need to be adjusted.’ That’s the type of interaction that might take place.”
Playing in the fall, some have suggested, might do the opposite and temporarily increase rights fees if fans aren’t allowed in stadiums and grow ratings because they can only watch games on TV.
But that comes with its own set of complications. What if California, which has taken a more aggressive approach to social distancing, keeps its public universities online for the fall semester — something athletic directors have said would mean no fall sports — and the nine other Mountain West footballplaying members are in states with students on campus?
San Diego State, Fresno State and San Jose State are part of the CSU system. Wyoming, for instance, is among those states currently without a stay-athome order.
Thompson admitted it’s a topic “du jour” in his virtual meetings with athletic directors. The problem, he said, is no one knows who will make that decision, or when, or how.
“Do we wait until the other three can join us?” Thompson said. “Do we amend the schedule and just play with those nine whose states are open? You’ve got 130 (FBS) university presidents with an unbelievable decision, but they report to a board. Then you’ve got 41 state governors (that have FBS programs). You’ve got 130 FBS athletic directors, 130 head coaches, a plethora of subcommittees looking at all these issues, medical safeguards, the NCAA Board of Directors and then, you could argue to some degree, the federal government.
“This will be the biggest, single compromised collaboration in college history, when and how we resume play. … Harry S. Truman said the buck stops here. Where does the buck stop on this one? Who is ultimately going to be allowed — or, a better word, forced — to make that decision? I don’t know it can be conference by conference.”
In the meantime, Thompson and his ADS wait to see how governors and university presidents act. The first marker likely is whether students are allowed back on campuses in August, either fully or in some sort of hybrid arrangement at a reduced capacity. Those announcements could come in the next month.
Working back, how much time do football programs need to safely ramp up with conditioning and practices? Thompson said his coaches prefer eight weeks in an optimal world but would settle for four if it means playing football this season.
The latest they could wait to make a decision on fall football? Thompson thinks mid-july.
And he’d like to wait as long as possible.
“The longer you can take to make these major decisions, I think the better decision will be made,” Thompson said. “At some point, you’ve got to fish or cut bait.”
The operative word being, cut.