The powers-that-be at the SEC have decided on a ten-game, conference-only schedule for 2020.

Although there have been no schedule released – we can probably expect them to come next week.

The decision meant that the season will start on September 26th – a month after Big 12 and three weeks after the Big Ten.

South Carolina Board of Trustees member Chuck Allen told The Athletic (via Twitter): “My understanding is the vote was 13-1 with our president, Bob Caslen, being the sole dissenting vote and part of the reason for his dissenting vote was the rivalry with Clemson.”

Either the SEC is waiting for another month to try and ‘get’ the numbers lower, or they are stupid.

Why stupid? If you go by ‘normal’ flu season, it starts around October time. If COVID-19 is at best a bad version of the flu and at worst a killer that’s putting more and more young people in hospitals, then this is a stupid idea.

“We did this in recognition that COVID’s not going away,” Commissioner Greg Sankey told the Paul Finebaum Show, adding that the reason why the SEC was conference-only so it would “crown a champion”.

The SEC’s decision – as explain to Ralph Russo on the Associated Press was because the schools were “expecting a possible spike in cases when students return to campus means the season needs to be delayed to give best chance to start. The delay eliminates room for non-conference games”.

The SEC Championship Game will be on December 19th.

Also: Nothing has been said by the SEC about permitted attendance at games, or tailgating, because that will go by a state-to-state basis.

Also hurting will be the FCS schools who needed the money from SEC schools for their programs to at best keep going and at worst survive. FCS schools will lose a total of $3.1 million between 11 schools.

Ohio State put out what their plan for college football games should be during games.

1. Capacity will be capped at 20%. The capacity at The Horseshoe will be no more than 20,988 at any one time.
2. There will be no tailgating.
3. Face covering will be required at games.

Now, while you can enforce the first one, stopping 20,000 people going into local Columbus bars before games isn’t an option, so you’ll have to trust them. You can enforce the third one, by either supplying Ohio State facemasks at the game or not letting people who won’t wear them or booting those who persistently don’t wear them during the game.

The SEC should do the same. Yes, we know that in the Southland, tailgating is an all-important social occasion for SEC teams. They are fun, they are loved by College Gameday, and they help ‘bring the noise’ to a stadium.

However, people’s lives are more important.

Putting the rules down now may annoy some of the SEC fanbase who will not doubt scream and yell and stamp their feet like children and go on about their freedoms, but if they want college football to go ahead, Ohio State’s model is the way to go.

Of course, they could always ban fans is the stadiums.

And so the dominos continue to fall.

According to multiple media sources, the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 have all decided that they will play a nine-game conference-only season

It is an effort to cut down the season and make it work, as well as give schools some wiggle-room if there an outbreak of COVID-19 on teams and campuses.

For the SEC a bunch of non-conference games will be affected, including (sadly), Clemson vs South Carolina, Georgia vs Georgia Tech, Louisville vs Kentucky and Florida State vs Florida.

Notre Dame have been told that the ACC will accommodate Notre Dame in its own schedule.

For the Big Ten the biggest match-ups being lost are Notre Dame’s game with Wisconsin, Penn State’s trip to Virginia Tech, and a monster of a game between Ohio State and Oregon.

Meanwhile, the Pac-12 is expected to announce that it too will go for a conference-only schedule, which will meant that there will be no Alabama vs USC game if that works out, as well as no USC vs Notre Dame.

The upshot is the with these incomplete schedules, it’s certain that the Big XII and SEC will follow suit.

What happens next is fascinating. Some of the schools play an 8 game conference schedule and other ones play nine. I suspect that it will go to nine, which means that SEC teams will add another game onto their schedules…..something that Nick Saban has been campaigning for for ages.

The Ivy League has cancelled its fall sports. Not postponed, cancelled.

Everyone in college football is taking a breath, now.

You might think that a bunch of rich schools cancelling sports isn’t a big thing. After all: Harvard? Yale? Who cares. They aren’t going pro on ESPN or anything (unless they are Ryan Fitzpatrick)…

But remember the Ivy League in March? They were the first to cancel their tournament because of COVID-19, and it created a domino effect that led to the cancellation of March Madness.

Could this happen in college football with the Ivy League schools taking these extraordinary measures?

Yes and no. The ‘Yes’ is the fact that what the Ivy League is very good at getting out in front of things. A lot of its members will be pushing to have online classes instead of in-person classes in the fall, meaning that there’s no point in putting out student-athletes if no-one else is on campus. And there’s also the fact that at Ivy League, they are all paying for the privilege of playing.

THE TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT

Of course there will be a trickle-down effect. There will no longer be cross-conference battles with the Patriot League. The Patriot League itself will then have its problems. For example, Holy Cross – who last year was given a bunch of money to get slaughtered by Navy and Syracuse – may well cancel its non-conference games. Lafayette has cancelled against Navy. Colgate has cancelled their Western Michigan game, Fordham will not play Hawaii and Colgate won’t go to Syracuse and Bucknell won’t play Army.

That means that Navy, Syracuse, Western Michigan and Army all have incomplete schedules going into 2020.

See where this rabbit hole goes?

The Ivy League’s move could be poison ivy.