With potentially major ripple effects to non-revenue sports like swimming, college football’s FBS will hold its first games tonight. The top division remains evenly split over a pandemic postponement of the season.
Southern Mississippi (C-USA) will host South Alabama (Sun Belt) tonight in the first matchup of Football Bowl Subdivision programs. And while most professional sports have only resumed without spectators in the stands, Southern Mississippi will host a crowd of up to 25% of the stadium’s seating capacity.
Tonight will also feature Conference-USA’s UAB taking on Central Arkansas, which is one tier down from the FBS, in the FCS.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has caused major shakeups to the FBS, which is the highest division of college football. As of now, four of the ten conferences in the FBS have postponed fall sports. Four conferences are proceeding with fall sports. And the remaining two have postponed all sports except football:
| KEEPING FALL SPORTS IN THE FALL AS OF NOW | POSTPONED FALL SPORTS EXCEPT FOOTBALL | CANCELING/POSTPONING FALL SPORTS |
| Power-5 | ||
| ACC | ||
| Big Ten | ||
| Big 12 | ||
| Pac-12 | ||
| SEC | ||
| Group of Five | ||
| AAC | ||
| C-USA | ||
| MAC | ||
| MWC | ||
| Sun Belt | ||
| FBS Independents | ||
| UConn | ||
| UMass | ||
| Notre Dame (w/ACC) | ||
| BYU (w/WCC) | ||
| New Mexico State | ||
| Liberty (w/ASUN) | ||
| Army West Point (w/ Patriot League) | ||
Recent reports have suggested that the Big Ten, though, has started to look into late-fall dates to start football, rather than spring dates as originally announced. Radio host Dan Patrick says the conference is considering October 10th – that would be the latest date the Big Ten could start football and still be eligible for the national championship playoff. Other reports have suggested that start dates around Thanksgiving could be in play, though all reports have suggested that there are plenty more hurdles to getting football restarted in the fall.
The postponement of football, a revenue-driver for many college athletic departments, has already had a major impact on college swimming & diving. Iowa cited $100 million in lost revenue in cutting its men’s and women’s swimming & diving programs. Michigan cited roughly the same figure in eliminating 21 positions in its athletic department.
Players should be playing and people should be allowed to go watch and live their lives. Only 6% of the coronavirus deaths are actually from the coronavirus itself. For example, yesterday we lost the great MLB pitcher Tom Seaver to complications from lyme disease and dementia but he also had the China virus (um.. coronavirus) and is listed as a corona virus death. The coronabros that have wreck havoc with our country and our sports continue to try to scare everyone and distort the facts.
I’m reading that the Big Ten presidents are very seriously considering taking a mulligan on their “no-go” vote. This would be very good news if they changed their minds. If you like Iowa swimming, you gotta also be cheering for fall football!
I have a feeling that even if Iowa does play football, they won’t bring back their team. This has been in the works for a long time now. Best to get the AD out of there and hope for swimming than to think he will change it back now
I’d put money on it that a full season of football wouldn’t save Iowa swimming at this point. Poorly run ADs were poorly run long before Covid struck
Big mistake!
what? canceling or competing? I say canceling is the mistake.
New Penn State report on Myocarditis says otherwise. You can keep trying to push to play but you’re seeing issues with the heart continue to pop up in both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. That’s one thing for a normal person but for athletes that push themselves to the limit, it’s quite dangerous.
Report form National Institute of Health doing nothing can be quite dangerous for anyone including athletes:
Because there is no space between having a season and “doing nothing”…smh
Honest question….are there any reports of these types of issues out there from any of the athletes that are back to training and competing in the US or the world? Seems like there are more and more low, mid, and elite-level athletes that are getting back into the swing of things and I just haven’t heard anything about those types of issues. I assume there is a relatively high chance that at least some of these athletes had it while being either symptomatic or asymptimatic at some point in the last six months.
Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez will miss the entire 2020 season because of it. Same for the Georgia State starting quarterback. One-third of the BIG10 football players who tested positive for COVID-19 had evidence of myocarditis on MRI. If you want to see your pro football draft stock plummet, have myocarditis listed on your medical record.
Good thing there are currently zero NFL players with it
And….that was already retracted