Can College Football return in the fall?

Dan Wetzel, Pat Forde, and Pete Thamel discuss if college football can come back in the fall and what would need to happen in order for games to be played. Subscribe to the Yahoo Sports College Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Video Transcript

[CROWD CHEERING]

DAN WETZEL: I know all of us talk across the week with various people in college athletics from kind of all spots. What's the latest you're hearing about football?

I will say this. The one thing I heard, probably the best line I heard, is anyone who thinks they got an answer is lying. Nobody really knows. But you know, the-- the great fear is football doesn't happen. And I don't even like thinking about it. But what do you guys hear?

PAT FORDE: Yeah, I mean, that's-- that is the great fear. And there are-- I've talked to a couple of people who really like-- they publicly don't want to speak about it, because they don't want to help induce panic within the college sports industry because, you know, for a bunch of different reasons.

A fall without a fully functioning revenue-heavy football season would be ruinous. You know, it would be-- the schools would be cutting sports, I think assuredly. It would be terrible, obviously, for the American psyche, I think, culturally to not have a football season. Obviously, again, we know there are more important things. But if we are still sitting here five months from now--

DAN WETZEL: Are there? Are there more important things?

PAT FORDE: [LAUGHS] I'm going to-- I'm going to say yes, but withhold judgment of anybody who disagrees.

DAN WETZEL: I'm-- I'm not going to say no. I'm not going to say yes. I'm not going to say no. I'm just-- are there?

PAT FORDE: [LAUGHS] I'll tell you this. If the whole summer remains shut down and we get to Labor Day weekend and there is football, it's going to be the happiest weekend for football fans ever. I mean, it will be ecstasy if we have a normal weekend where you can go to games and everything looks and feels and sounds and tastes the same. You know, it may not happen, but boy do people-- will people want it and need it.

But the administrators I've talked to, they're scared of it, and they're-- you know, everybody's modeling contingencies. You know, there was the weird "Sports Business Journal" take about a earlier season, which makes no sense whatsoever-- you know, starting in July because of worrying about the virus ramping up in the colder months.

At the opposite end of it, there's people talking about starting the season in, like, January or December, January, February, somewhere in there, which would be very challenging in a lot of parts of the country. But you know, there's a lot of contingencies being laid. Let's hope none of them actually come to pass, because none of them are very good contingencies.

PETE THAMEL: So I have my three-part, completely unscientific checklist of things that need to happen before we can have football, or three factors that need to happen. There could be different versions of football.

For there to be football, the first thing there needs to be is football practice. For football practice to happen, there needs to be a preponderance of tests, right? You cannot bring students to campus and have them practice football and one team gets a coronavirus and it spreads. Rudy Gobert, you know, was obviously an example of that, NBA.

So right now, we do not have enough tests. That's like step one in the most basic level. Step two, which I don't think has been talked about enough, is, can you have college football on campuses in the no-fan theory if you don't have college. Can you have no students on campus and then still have some sort of heavily quarantined version of college football?

And then the last thing, quickly, is fans. Like, I got a hard time imagining, you know, 90,000 people packed in Tuscaloosa or the Shoe or Jerry World or whatever. Like, those are the exact behaviors that you can't have, like, in terms of large gatherings of people for that. So that's my highly unscientific, three-pronged checklist.

But I do think the question-- and I'd be curious what you think about it, Pat. Like, you have kids who'd have to go back to school. Like, I don't know. Do you think we can have college football without college?

PAT FORDE: No. No, I don't. And people, administrators that I've talked to have said the same thing. Like, we're not going to bring back an athletic population to an otherwise closed campus. You know, that's just-- that's not going to work.

So if we are still in a remote learning situation for fall semester, then we are probably not going to have football. I don't think anybody is willing to put that cart in front of the academic horse to that extent.

DAN WETZEL: Don't forget the liability issues here.

PETE THAMEL: Oof.

PAT FORDE: Sure, yeah.

DAN WETZEL: So you know, not many-- mercifully, this virus has not killed many young people, but it has killed a few, some. I don't-- we don't know, but enough that you just-- the liability of the school is there.

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