When will college football start?

According to ESPN reporting, college football season will either be pushed back to start on September 26th or postponed until spring. What is certainly clear right now is that there is not a detailed league-wide plan to deal with the pandemic. Each college is making its own decision on whether or not to play.

The NBA has succeeded so far with the “bubble” experiment in Orlando. MLB baseball, despite the cancellation of several games in the first week, has managed to keep their season going with a quarter of the season completed. College football, however, is on a completely different scale. Let me explain why.

An NBA team has a maximum of fifteen players on its roster. Only twenty-two NBA teams are active right now. That’s 330 players in the Orlando “bubble.” Major League Baseball has an active roster of twenty-eight players currently. All thirty teams are active, so that’s 840 players to keep virus-free.

Now consider college football. An NCAA roster can have as many as one hundred and twenty-five active players on a team. Eighty-five of those players can be on scholarships. There are currently one hundred thirty NCAA Division I-A teams. Depending on how many players per team you are looking at, that is somewhere between 11,000 to 16,000 players.

With that increased size comes increased complexity. Another significant difference between the pro and college games is that the professional leagues have commissioners to set rules for the entire league. The NCAA does not have the authority to place regulations on how teams handle COVID-19 testing and screening.

Several colleges are still in the process of determining if, when, and how many students will return to campus this fall. At the time of this writing, the major conferences (Big Ten, PAC-12, SEC, ACC, and Big 12) are still determining if there will be college football this season.

Some conferences like the Mountain West and the Mid-American conferences have already canceled their fall football seasons. The NCAA has also announced that all championships for Division II and III fall sports are canceled. My best guess is this will get pushed out to spring.