Normally, the first week of August would be an active time in college football. Teams across the nation, at all levels, would be starting preseason camps and planning for the season ahead.
This year, though, things are a little different. Just 25 days before the first scheduled games of the 2020 college football season, the schedule remains in shambles.
The Big 12 conference became the last Power Five league to announce an adjusted schedule on Monday, switching to a round robin plus one nonconference matchup slate. The Big Ten, SEC and Pac-12 have already eliminated all nonconference games. The Group of Five is still mulling options.
At the sub-FBS level, decisions are harder than ever to follow. With 51 combined conferences between Division-II and Division-III alone, schedules and timelines are changing at a rate previously unbeknownst to college athletics.
“I’ve been in athletics for 40 years and been in an athletic director’s chair for 30-plus years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Tarleton State athletic director Lonn Reisman. “You might have one or two scheduling blips once in a while, but nothing where you’re trying to formulate a whole new schedule. It’s been very, very difficult.”
Shifting the Calendar
Hardin-Simmons coach Jesse Burleson was in the midst of planning his fall season when news came that the American Southwest Conference was postponing football. The Abilene-based Cowboys were fresh off a top 15 finish in the D-III polls and were hoping for a breakthrough moment. Now, it has to wait.
“I think that very honestly, we knew that as bad as we wanted it to be as close to normal as possible, we knew that wasn’t probably a possibility,” Burleson said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen, we just knew it wouldn’t be the outcome we all wanted.”
But even two weeks after the decision, ASC member institutions don’t have much clarity on what the decision means in practice.
“For me as the head coach, it seems like I started with Plan A and now I’m on Plan T,” Burleson said. “You make a plan and it seems like even later that day, it’s obsolete and you start all over. I’ve got like four calendars going right now. On our side, it’s strictly planning to make sure we can best not only get back together but be safe.”
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