COVID is obviously going to force a major upheaval of the 2020-2021 college sports seasons. IMO, anyone who thinks football is happening this year is fooling themselves.
But what long-term shifts will this create? Stanford just became the first Power 5 school to announce it was permanently getting rid of some sports. I think many others will follow suit as budgets are crushed, and a few years from now things like sailing, lacrosse, and fencing will be strictly club sports.
This columnist from Tucson speculates that it could force schools to reevaluate the importance of athletics in schools, with massive cutting of expenses and coach salaries. Maybe the NFL finally has to create a junior league to feed the pro teams.
I don’t know, but top of my wish list is that they stop cramming 50,000 seats into a 30,000 seat stadium. Better yet, turn every other seat into a cup holder.
It definitely looks like Stanford had quite a bloated sports program. I’m not sure it’s all Covid related, I bet the increasingly burdensome NCAA compliance rules had something to do with it and Covid was a convenient way to axe some sports.
I don’t think college football is going anywhere soon, as I mentioned in the NFL thread, I think the biggest threat would be some sort of concussion legal suit that would hamper college football.
I still have doubts about any minor league football system working. I mentioned in the minor league baseball reduction thread that it’s obvious a lot of guys are only getting to play minor league ball because you need nine men on the field, many aren’t legit major league prospects. Football amplifies that. If college football didn’t have the schools attached to the teams and the history band was just a bunch of minor league teams, it wouldn’t have near the following.