On a conference call with Vice President Mike Pence Wednesday, the College Football Playoff Management Committee made it clear there will be no sports until schools are open.
“Our players are students. If we’re not in college, we’re not having contests,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told CBS Sports. “Our message was, we need to get universities and colleges back open, that we were education-based programs, and we weren’t going to have sports until we had something closer to normal college going on.”
It makes sense, economics aside.
If it’s not safe for students to attend school in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, then how in the world would it make sense for college football players (or student-athletes in any other sport) to congregate in large numbers?
Yeah, we’re looking at you, Mike Gundy.
Looking ahead at what this might mean for college football, it’s not great.
California Governor Gavin Newsom made it clear on Tuesday that he doesn’t anticipate games being played in front of fans any time soon, putting the NFL season in doubt.
In that same press conference, Newsom made it clear that large gatherings of any kind won’t be happening in California for months and months.
“The prospect of mass gatherings is negligible at best until we get to herd immunity and we get to a vaccine,” Newsom said, per The Mercury News. “So large-scale events that bring in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of strangers altogether across every conceivable difference, health and otherwise, is not in the cards based upon our current guidelines and current expectations.”
So, while everyone wants sports back, it’s starting to look pretty bleak when it comes to college football in 2020.