Big Ten and Pac-12 won’t play football in fall 2020, Big 12 to move forward with fall season: Rpt

Although the Big Ten and Pac-12 decided to nix their fall football seasons, the Big 12 conference reportedly plans to go ahead with their 2020 fall season, according to Bloomberg. Yahoo Sports National Columnist Dan Wetzel joins The Final Round panel to break down the financial repercussions of cancelled college sports seasons and what this means going forward for college and professional sports.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Let's turn our attention now to a story that we've been following all week, and that is the drama that has gone on in the world of college football. The Big 10, Pac-12 formally postponing their season during yesterday's show, I think right at the 3 o'clock hour.

Joining us now to talk more about where college football goes from here is Dan Wetzel. He's a national columnist here with Yahoo Sports. And Dan, your piece that was up late last night, I think, when I read that, I sort of felt like college football is a metaphor for the whole country in this pandemic, where there's a leadership void, everyone's making their own decisions. And it would seem right now the sport is trying to figure out if it is indeed one entity, or if it's really just a couple conferences kind of fighting for themselves. I mean, what have you heard from folks in the last 24 hours about the future of this whole project?

DAN WETZEL: Well, I think what you need to understand about college football, unlike, say, the NFL or the NBA, is that there's not a central leadership. The NCAA kind of regulates it. But there's no central authority. There's no commissioner of this sport. It's divided into all these different conferences, Big 10, SEC, ACC, all the way down to Conference USA or whatever. They all can make their own decisions. Even individual schools can.

So what you have here is 53 of the 130 schools right now have said, we're not playing football, either by conference or by their own individual decision. 77 are saying they will continue to push forward. We'll see if they'll actually get there or not. But they haven't given up on the year.

You'd never get that in another sport. You're not going to have the NFC North playing and the AFC South not playing, let alone the two sides disagreeing about everything, including our medical doctors say this, yours recommend that. There's just no central information. So it's a extremely confusing and really frustrating time for college football.

That can be a colorful and enjoyable regional rivalries and bickering and all that. In the face of a pandemic, a little better to have more control and a central leadership. But that's not what college football has, and that's why you have this really weird situation.

DAN ROBERTS: Dan, Dan Roberts here. In addition to some of the Power 5 conferences, as of now, saying they'll play, the two that have canceled fall are still claiming that they'll play in the spring instead. And that's been interestingly received. I mean, across the landscape, you have a lot of people saying, that's kind of a pipe dream, college football in the spring wouldn't work for a number of reasons. And yet just today, you know, Ryan Day at Ohio State, the coach there, saying that he wants to start in January.

Now some see this is just an effort to try to keep the top players that are in those conferences at their schools instead of transferring to one of the other conferences. It's obviously a mess. But I'd love to get your take on whether you think college football happening in the spring is in any way realistic.

DAN WETZEL: I think it's highly unlikely. And I think when you talk to the people that would make this decision, they talk about how challenging it would be. It just opens up a whole new bit of problems. How do you play in the spring and then in the fall? All of your best players are going to go pro and try to get into the NFL draft, which is not going to push their thing back.

One of the other problems is you have the coaches, whose job is to recruit and to continue to motivate their athletes. The only incentive for those coaches is to be over the top in saying, we want to play, we will play. There's just no incentive to be a realist and say, boy, this would be kind of hard. So you're going to get head coaches saying all sorts of things. We might still play. You know, because if not, they're going to get killed in recruiting on this, where you're saying, jeez, these guys quit. You go there, who knows if they'll play again. You come here and you will. All the different things.

So I wouldn't listen too much to a head coach. Presidents, commissioners, athletic directors, medical boards, board of trustees-- that's another problem, you have this many people making decisions. I think spring football is highly, highly unlikely. The best route for this sport, if it doesn't play in the fall, and that's still very much up in the air anyone will play in the fall, is come back and try to do it right in 2021 with a full slate of games and the full revenue that that would bring with bowls, playoff, everything.

- Hey, Dan I want to go back to what you were saying before, just about the fact that there's no central leadership. And it kind of goes along with what you were just saying, that there's just so many people making decisions. There's no commissioner of the sport. Obviously, very different than the professional leagues. But it was also different than what we saw when the NCAA canceled the March madness tournament back in March. I mean, they did that in a single meeting.

So is this something that you think needs to change, or should change, when it comes to college football?

DAN WETZEL: Well, it would be best if it wasn't this way. But it's not going to change. Because you would have to have these-- you know, each conference is a billion dollar entity in itself, these major conferences. And there they're probably very unlikely to just give up the power to do their own thing and just cede that power to somebody else. Right now, they can't agree on much of anything. So they're not going to agree on that.

The reason the NCAA basketball tournament was able to get canceled in a day is because the NCAA actually runs that, and it was just a single event. Although that was overwhelming panic going on at that time, back in March. But yeah, you just don't have anybody who can call the shots here.

And the other thing is, you know, college football is as popular as the NBA, or, you know, it's really probably the second most popular sport after the NFL. But its chief business is not existing. The NFL is a business that plays football. The NBA is a business that plays basketball. College football is this side thing attached to universities, which is even a bigger business.

So the chief motivation of the University of Michigan is not to have a football team in the fall. It's to make sure that they're healthy enough to have a spring semester, where they're bringing their students on. And that's the case across the board. All of higher education is struggling right now to try to figure out how to do this, how to keep kids on campus, where they make a lot of money out of the dorms and all of that, and basically operate. And football, as big as it is, is a small part of these massive universities.

MYLES UDLAND: And then, Dan, to that point, I mean, you know, what we've seen with the season being postponed and then the player movement, you know, the we want to play, Trevor Lawrence starting that, there's been this question around-- and of course, amateurism was kind of an open question, it seemed like that was starting to turn a little bit as well. And you mentioned that football is tacked on to the business of the university.

But you kind of get the sense that, to some extent, I'd imagine, you know, athletic directors think, well, why couldn't we just run this in a different way, where it's semi pro or quasi pro, basically is now. But I mean, does this change sort of the assumptions that are made of student athletes attending class? Does this change the whole character of that going forward as we rethink what college football means?

DAN WETZEL: It could. But probably not in the short term. The incentive of the power, the establishment, is to keep this system. It works. They pay below market value for top talent. They're paying them with tuition, room, board, a small stipend. It's not that they don't get anything, but they're not getting millions. They're not sharing, you know, 50% of revenue, the way the NFL and the NFLPA do.

They also avoid paying taxes. Because this is just a-- you know, this is just an extracurricular activity that 110,000 people show up to watch every Saturday and pay premium parking and all that. So it's-- they have a lot of advantages in do that.

They also are dealing with Title IX concerns. They have to provide an equal number of opportunities for women. They'd like to have full athletic departments. They don't just want to have a football team and a basketball team. They want to have lacrosse and baseball and field hockey and, you know, track and field. Those sports are money drains.

So there, you would have to blow the entire system up and change everything. College athletics works really, really well for the people inside college athletics. And it may not work that well for a certain segment of the players. But those players are only there for a short time. So it's very hard for them to corral their thing.

I will say this, the lack of income coming in, the revenue coming in, schools will lose $100 million in revenue this year. That will be a challenge to overcome. They can take out loans. They can do different things. Some of them have rainy day funds. But I would expect, actually, athletic departments to grow smaller, scholarship cuts in other sports, teams shuttered altogether. It's going to be a reckoning because you just can't take $100 million loss on these size businesses and survive.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah. We've seen some of that already, but it seems like there are many shoes to drop on that front going forward.

All right. Dan Wetzel, national columnist with Yahoo Sports. Dan, thanks so much for taking the time today.

DAN WETZEL: Always fun to be on with you guys. Thank you.