The commissioners of the Power 5 conferences came together virtually on Sunday for an emergency meeting. The get-together was to discuss concerns that most athletes and school officials alike have about the fall schedule. Those issues re all directly related to COVID-19 and how everyone will be protected during these troubling times.
Numerous sources have told ESPN that Big Ten presidents are ready to cancel the fall sports season after meeting on Saturday. However, they did want to see where everyone else from the Power 5 conferences – the ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC – stood on the matter.
Also, many of the Big Ten presidents have said they would vote on postponing the football season – preferably into the spring.
“It doesn’t look good,” one Power 5 athletic director said.
Notre Dame just inked a deal to become a part of the ACC for this season, with the power schools playing in-conference schedules only in 2020. ND athletic director Jack Swarbrick wondered if there were any options to pivot, should anything be needing change.
“My view is if we change course, we better be able to articulate the reason for doing so to our student-athletes,” Swarbrick told ESPN.
On Saturday, the Mid-American Conference (MAC) became the first FBS league to postpone the fall sports season, which includes football. This coming Tuesday, presidents and chancellors from the Pac-12 universities will meet on their own and figure something definitive.
“No one has talked about a plan if the season is canceled,” West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons, who is the chair of the Football Oversight Committee, told ESPN. “If it’s canceled, we need to be able to give clear direction at that time, as opposed to saying, ‘We don’t know.'”
Over the past 48 hours, there have been numerous sources telling ESPN that the postponement or cancellation of the football season seems inevitable. A lot of those same sources believe that it will take a move from one of the Power 5 conferences to begin the domino effect and that the Big Ten or Pac-12 will likely be the first ones to do so.
“Nobody wanted to be the first to do it,” a Power 5 coach told ESPN, “and now nobody will want to be the last.”
There is a Power 5 administrator that also said, “It feels like no one wants to, but it’s reaching the point where someone is going to have to.”
The ACC, Big 12, and SEC all waited to see what happened until students returned to the campuses this month. However, they may be forced to take action if the Big Ten and Pac-12 are up doing away with fall sports.
This sort of confusion with playing or not isn’t lost on us. Back in March, before the world was turned upside down from the coronavirus, numerous conferences started canceling athletic competition. The Big East Conference tried to hold out as long as possible and eventually wound up canceling its conference’s play in the middle of a tournament game at Madison Square Garden.
