The NCAA has already postponed or canceled all of its Division I, II and III fall championships…with the exception of the FBS conferences. The NCAA doesn’t control the FBS; the conferences do. So we have the MAC, the MWC, the Big Ten and the Pac-12 postponing their fall 2020 seasons, the Big 12 declaring that they will play in the fall (despite nine positive COVID-19 diagnoses for the University of Oklahoma’s football team so far), and the ACC and the SEC continuing to hang on the fence. The AAC, Conference USA and the Sun Belt Conference appear to be moving full speed ahead. Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields has started a petition for the Big Ten to change its mind, and in the first four hours, over 121,000 people had signed it. So what will happen?
For college football betting enthusiasts, this is what we know about the situation at this writing.
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Will There Be College Football to Bet On?
Jon Drezner is the team physician for the University of Washington and a part of the Pac-12 medical advisory board. In an interview with CBS Sports, Drezner said, “We are in the middle of a pandemic, our country is one of the worst controlled on the planet. We have more deaths than any country. We have curses surging all over the place. We haven’t done what we needed to do to play fall sports. And that is really sad.”
Brian Hainline is the chief medical officer for the NCAA. In an interview with CNN, he said that “there’s no way we can go forward with sports” unless nationwide testing undergoes an improvement.
So what would the conferences that want to push forward do to minimize the danger of COVID-19 spread? You can’t move college athletes into the same sort of “bubble” that made the NBA and the NHL safe spaces for play. COVID-19 spread has been a problem for several teams in Major League Baseball — and there is a lot less physical contact in baseball than there is in football.
The SEC has committed to testing players at least two times a week, and possibly adding a third test. The FDA just approved a testing method that uses a person’s saliva, developed at Yale University. This could lead to results that are quicker and more accurate.
However, there are concerns that remain, even if the saliva testing method proves to work. Several of the ACC schools are scheduled to play Liberty University in non-conference play, but there is no evidence that Liberty follows the same protocols that the ACC has in place for its teams to follow.
On the other side, of course, there is also scientific support. Catherine O’Neal is an infectious diseases expert at LSU, one of the SEC member schools. She sat down with The Athletic and called out the Big Ten and Pac-12 when she said, “I would say we have seen enough to develop a safe plan. They have not.”
It is important to remember that scientists have only been tangling with COVID-19 for about five months. While a saliva-based test is helpful, it is not a vaccine, and it is not a treatment.
What we have here is a battle over money. Estimates of the loss of advertising revenue for television networks, should the fall college football season not take place, run around $1 billion. Colleges depend heavily on the revenue that college football and college basketball bring in, and the institutions already took the heavy hit that came when March Madness, the men’s college basketball tournament, was canceled due to pandemic concerns.
It makes sense that some of the big names in college football want to play. Justin Fields, Trevor Lawrence and many others want to play their season and elevate their draft status. However, there have also been Zoom conference calls involving concerned college football players and medical experts in the college system.
Oklahoma State University had to lock down the Pi Beta Phi sorority house when 23 members tested positive for COVID-19. The University of North Carolina has shut down in-person classes and is encouraging dormitory students to move back home, if that is possible. Of course, they are still planning to take part in their football season. Nick Saban has claimed that his players are safer on campus than they would be at home and to move the season to the spring would be akin to having a “JV” season.
So we don’t know what will happen. What legitimacy would a College Football Playoff have without two of the Power 5 conferences playing ball? How many weeks will the season go if COVID-19 cases start to appear?
For right now, we don’t have an answer. Stay tuned! | Check the Odds
