The end of collegiate athletics…as we know it.
At the timing of me writing this, the Mid-American and Big 10 Conferences have cancelled fall sports for the 2020 calendar year. Most likely throughout the next couple days, more conferences will follow suit. All of this leads me to ask one question, what will college sports look like moving forward? Not only for this year but for years to come. If we are to be completely honest, college sports as a whole need to shut down and make a comeback in August 2021.
Most colleges and universities are going to be closed for the fall and if we are to follow the wave of the tech companies, should not be back until summer of 2021. If you are a senior athlete, what can you do? For instance, the University at Buffalo has a senior guard by the name of Javon Graves, who returned for his senior season after throwing his hat in the 2020 NBA draft. If there is no college basketball this season, what options should he take? Forget this year, leave school and play overseas, wait it out and hope the NCAA grants everyone an extra year of eligibility or just workout for a year and hope to enter the 2021 NBA draft? This is just one player at one school. There are hundreds, if not thousands of players who will face the same dilemma over the next coming weeks.
Some schools before this week have already shut down a few sports and it’s not just small schools. Stanford has shut down 11 varsity sports, Cincinnati and UConn have both gotten rid of varsity sports teams. To think that in the next few weeks, I believe there will be tons of other schools who are going to be facing the same problem. Without the student body on campus, not only are some schools at risk of not fielding teams for this year, they may not never recover and are forced to shut down. That, an extreme case in itself, is still a possibility.
What’s Next
If everyone continues down the same path blazed by the IVY League, there will be no NCAA sports going on for the Fall 2020 season. In my eyes it makes no sense to play football in the spring and then try to get it back crackin in August. Basketball, may be able to have a shortened season, play conference only games and have conference winners play into a NCAA like tournament series. The next focus for these schools should be trying to save as many sports as possible or getting rid of the ones that are unnecessary. Salvaging the money, obviously is most important but not at the expense of a student-athletes life. One Covid related death, all because a school or conference wants to play sports, could shut an entire system down.