College football 2020 offseason thread

At least they're honest. I have laughed at Power 5 ADs who have said they're going to lose $45 million from this. You're losing everything. Just say it. When football craters -- and it will -- basketball will follow.

 

CUSA keeping football in fall, but moving both soccers and volleyball to the winter.

 

Why this is as good a time as any to reconsider conference realignment

 

No, because now we know essentially nothing, and everything we know now could be completely wrong in 3 or 6 months.

If some kind of reasonably effective treatment or vaccine appears by wintertime -- allowing partial football and basketball seasons this school year -- maybe there can be some kind of faltering return to near normalcy (it'll take probably a decade).

If we arrive in August 2021 with things the same as they are now -- or worse-- major college sports as we've known them are over. Three quarters of all major FB and BB programs will collapse. There'll be a couple dozen schools in each sport who will try to hang on, but that'll be it.

 

So I'm in the car tonight and sports radio is doing high school football scores as if everything was normal, with the exception of a couple of games that were called because one of the teams was in quarantine. It felt very strange.

 

Did you read it? It's essentially saying screw the conference tie ins for now, this season it makes more sense to play the schools around you instead of flying halfway across the country.

 

Well, this season, yeah. But most conferences are pretty geographical anyway, especially if they're divided into regional divisions.

 

Blink. Blink. Do what?

To pick an easy one, Mizzou is in the SEC East.

C-USA stretches from El Paso to Miami to Norfolk.

"Hey, here's a great idea during a pandemic: Let's have West Virginia fly 1,400 miles to play a Big 12 game at Texas Tech on Oct. 24, but let's not allow West Virginia to play Pittsburgh. After all, the Panthers, 75 miles away, are in the ACC.

Before the Pac-12 broke the emergency glass on its 2020 season, the conference approved of Colorado flying 1,300 miles to play at Washington but thought it too risky for the Buffaloes to drive 100 miles to play at Colorado State."


Yes, the idea is impractical as hell, especially to talk about it at this point, but there are all sorts of conference outliers who are way the hell away from the rest.

 

I feel like I'm nit-picking, but there is a logic to Missouri being in the SEC East besides keeping the league's divisions balanced. It's actually closer, or comparably close, to more of the East Division schools than the West. I don't have all the mileages in front of me, but Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Tennessee are all closer to Columbia than any West school except Arkansas. And the road trips to Columbia 2 and Athens are pretty comparable to going to College Station or Baton Rouge. Only the trip to Florida is a real outlier.

 

I really don't want to die on the hill of this article. It's fluff in a lot of ways, a what-if sort of backseat driving after the fact. I know why the conferences leaned toward playing within the conference more than normal. Basically it's just saying that it would have made more sense to play teams who were close geographically, but given the scramble to figure out if they were playing and if so who, there wasn't a lot of out of the box thinking going on.

 

Similar to what I was seeing on Twitter, except it was a lot of prep writers trying to remember the last time they didn't have a Friday night game this time of year.