Tuesday could be the day that changes everything in college sports. The Pac-12 CEO Group is set to meet Tuesday to potentially determine the fate of the upcoming fall college sports season with football being the primary sport in focus, of course. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have been at the forefront of the ongoing rumors that a cancellation of the season will be coming some time soon, but Jon Wilner of The Mercury News has said no decision has yet been made.
The players have made their position known with the "#WeWantToPlay" hashtag becoming quite popular across social media over the last 24 hours. Presidents and chancellors are not in the same category it would seem.
Leaders in the Big Ten are meeting Monday and could vote on whether or not to have a season by the evening while officials in the SEC also called a meeting Monday. The ACC leadership will meet Wednesday while the Big 12 leaders will meet Tuesday.
It should be known by the middle of the week whether or not there will be college sports before the end of 2020 and right now things are trending toward a postponement based on most of the reports.
A cancellation of the fall season with a postponement to the spring will open an entirely new can of worms as it relates to rosters, scholarships and eligibility adding to the task the leaders across college sports have on their hands when it comes to athletes uniting and calling for the formation of a players' association.
The Pac-12 has its fallback plan should a season not take place with the recent report of a loan that the conference would use to make up for lost revenue that would come with a shutdown of the season. Still, not having a college football season would change the landscape of college athletics and the ones making the decisions understand that.
The loss of the college football season is something Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke has not wanted to think about over the last several months has he has worked to guide the Wildcats through the turbulent times among the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s very important for the economic health of college athletics," he said back in the spring. "... For my colleagues around the country it is critical to all of us that we play college football, that it happens on some level. Without college football? Devastating to the overall college athletics enterprise. The resources that surround college football at a local level when you talk about tickets, donations and the revenue streams there but then you start to talk about the revenues from media packages, from the Pac-12 that are distributed among our college partners all the way up to the College Football Playoff media package.
“It just has an enormous amount of revenue streams that feed back into our universities, our athletic program and are important to the financial viability and health of our overall programs."
Heeke remained optimistic just a few weeks ago when discussing the Pac-12's plan to move to a conference-only schedule that the league finalized less than two weeks ago.
“I am optimistic, I am bullish we’re gonna do it,” he said on the Eye on the Ball radio show. “Certainly football and the scheduling thing is focused on the fall. We want this to happen in the fall. We have not entertained a spring schedule, really. That’s kind of always there. It’s kind of up on the shelf, we know it’s there and we can move to it, but let’s exhaust every once of possibilities for the fall.”
It seems everyone has an opinion on what needs to happen from the top players in the country such as Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence to media members, coaches and even Donald Trump, but none of that could matter once all the presidents and chancellors across college athletics come to their final decisions some time this week.
In the meantime each program is taking its own approach to summer workouts. While Washington decided to halt its mandatory workouts scheduled for Monday amid the uncertainty, Arizona opted to conduct business as usual with its mandatory workouts and meetings that started late last week.
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