Notre Dame camp set to open but college football picture cloudy
Pre-season camps barely have opened across college football, and Notre Dame is set to start its 2020 preparations midweek.
But it’s been a wild few days of college football off-the-field news, with MAC schools electing to shelve their fall sports including football, and some increased chatter about a possibly spring football season – especially from some Big Ten programs.
Matt, myself and the rest of the guys all have been combing for info on the current state of things in college football, so just a few notes and nuggets we can pass along:
Notre Dame is set to open preseason camp on Wednesday as of now. Everyone is on high alert. We've been told by multiple ACC assistants that the fear level for a cancelled season is high among many teams.
The ND person reported this past week as having tested positive for COVID-19 WAS NOT an student-athlete and had not been exposed to any student-athletes.
A couple of folks in the Pac-12 have told us for the past two weeks they did not expect to get to play; they're having trouble even getting all of their players onto campus and being allowed to use facilities, due to various executive orders.
As for Saturday's news of cancellation of the MAC season and Big Ten meetings and beyond, the MAC move is considered basically two-pronged: Finances and liability. Those factors ruled the day in that league and are driving many of the talks elsewhere around college athletics. Conservative estimates from coaches in roughly a half-dozen different college programs are that once-a-week COVID testing in a football program would cost approximately $500k for a season. The multi-week plans popping up in the larger conferences are seen to carry seven-figure price tags.
MAC programs are largely barely scraping by as is; even with a single money game, the thinking we were told is that they couldn't justify the expenses and the risk, in their terms.
A college coach told me yesterday that one MAC team found out from a player in a team meeting that the season was being axed. "A lineman blurted out the season's cancelled in a team meeting. Coaches didn't know."
A Big Ten program was on the practice field yesterday already having transitioned into some padded work, when the AD got the word that the Big Ten was mandating teams scale back to helmets-only work. The AD walked into the field, told the coach the latest and allowed the team to finish that practice.
More on the Big Ten front, we are strongly told that Iowa and Nebraska have buy-in from top-down school leadership to play the coming season, many other Big Ten schools rest in the middle unsure and per multiple people in the Big Ten, Michigan is seen as a spring season proponent. Situations at Illinois, Indiana, Northwestern and Rutgers have prompted the Big Ten to all but hit the pause button and sparked contentious debate in that league. Folks in the Big Ten told us that the outbreak at one of those schools was traced specifically to a house party hosted by some football players. The Big Ten conference call hosted early this past week was said to have lasted more than four hours with the league's ADs and player reps on the call.
Many schools, Big Ten, SEC and beyond, are crippled by the fear of the unknown of trying to have this season amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and also what the fiscal devastation might otherwise be without college athletics, especially football. An SEC president told folks privately this week, "We have to try to play football, or multiple schools in our league will go broke."
While Clemson is still trying, for now, to iron out its early-season non-conference game against The Citadel, three different FCS assistants told us within the past week they believe their season will be entirely cancelled.
And a quick college hoops note, multiple NCAA coaches and administrators have told us within the past week that the discussion is centered on trying to start the college basketball season by 1-1-21, with a conference-only schedule expected and potential bubble options also being explored for various leagues.
