‘Without college football, college athletics will be in trouble’
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Yahoo Sports reporter Pete Thamel joins Yahoo Finance Live to break down the potential scenarios for collegiate sports amid COVID-19.
Video Transcript
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JENNIFER ROGERS: Welcome to Yahoo Finance Presents Time Out: Sports Interrupted. From the Olympics to the Masters to the NBA, our favorite sports have stopped around the globe, as the world looks to reopen what's next for athletes, fans, and the sports industry overall.
Our first guest is Pete Thamel with Yahoo Sports. So Pete, this week, the NFL actually released a 2020 schedule. Now, you cover college sports. What's the expectation for college football, which we all know is the main revenue driver for all collegiate athletics? Are they going to have a season?
PETER THAMEL: Jen, that's the magic question. And the prevailing thought is there will be a season. And at this point, we can say with some certainty, it's not going to look like seasons in the past. Now, what form it will look like and how it will unfold.
Will it be shortened? Will it be delayed? Will it be pushed back to spring to wait for some treatments, technologies, potential vaccines, et cetera? We're not sure. But you are 100% right, Jen. Without college football, college athletics is in big trouble.
DAN ROBERTS: Pete, Dan Roberts here. Thanks for coming on. You know, as some schools might not reopen on time-- and we're obviously waiting to see-- James Franklin, the Penn State coach, came out and made some remarks about maybe playing anyway even if some schools haven't opened.
It's really hard to see that working. I mean, if you've a conference, and two of the schools in the conference aren't back on campus, do you think that's even a possibility some kind of staggered start? It seems to me like it has to be nationally uniform with every college and university back on campus to really start out the season on top.
PETER THAMEL: Well, Dan, there's one little dirty little secret about college athletics. Nobody's in charge. The NCAA will have no say, essentially, on whether these schools go back. So if the ACC wants to go back without, say, Boston College and Syracuse where there's maybe more of a penetration to the virus, or if the Pac-12 wants to push forward without Washington, Bay Area schools-- LA-- it's been hit pretty hard out there, the conferences themselves are going to have to take directives from local and state governments.
But after that, I feel like it's going to turn to "The Hunger Games" a little bit, Dan. The FCC is not going to stay patient if Vanderbilt doesn't want to play. And Clemson isn't going to not play football this year just because Boston College can't play.
So I really think we are going to see some kind of fracture, which brings up the half billion-dollar question-- what do you do with the playoff? I mean, the playoff is really one of the few things that actually unites these leagues. It's a financial contract with the television networks, essentially.
And so that will be the fascinating thing. If one league only plays seven games and another one plays nine, and you go 7 and 0 or 8 and 1, how do you fairly judge these teams when there appears like there will be less or a little crossover data?
MYLES UDLAND: And, you know, Pete, you mentioned "The Hunger Games." And as someone who was an Olympic sport athlete, a nonrevenue sport, that's downstream from all of this. What's the chatter basically on where some of these programs stand? I mean, I think there's definitely people bracing for a huge wave of programs to be cut at athletic departments across the country.
PETER THAMEL: Well, Myles, what-- the way it was described to me a couple weeks ago by an athletic director was this is going to be an opportunity to, as Winston Churchill said, never waste a good crisis. And the schools that were looking to trim from their budgets by cutting sports now have an excuse to do it.
We've seen Old Dominion cut wrestling. We've seen University of Cincinnati cut men's soccer. We've seen St. Edward's division two school in Austin, Texas cut six sports. So I don't think people are going to wake up and say, oh, my. It's a pandemic. We're in a crunch. We have to cut sports. But I think those who are peering at their budget and wondering, when can I do this and take the PR hit, that opportunity is going to unfold in front of them in the near future.
DAN ROBERTS: Pete, even if things start on time for college football, obviously it's not going to be a typical season. You might have social distancing and masks-wearing and all kinds of checks and safety precautions. So as a result, what changes might we see from actual big-time recruits?
And not just high school seniors who are big recruits heading to college, but even college seniors who might go to the draft early. I mean, might some kids say, you know what. I'm just going to wait a whole season until things start to look normal again.
PETER THAMEL: So I think, Dan, the real place we could see a difference is if there is a significantly delayed season, meaning after January 1, the season starts-- some of these real high profile athletes, like a Trevor Lawrence, for example-- the guys who know they are going to be a top 10 pick before a snap of football is played this year-- there will be a hesitancy among them say, OK, I'm going to play from January to May, then go to the NFL combine and then be in a camp in July?
It just doesn't make a lot of sense, especially when you already are guaranteed millions and don't have a lot to prove. So there is a thought from the Asian community, Dan, if we play in the spring, we will play without the biggest stars.
MYLES UDLAND: And we've focused I think a lot here on football. But this kind of began with March Madness getting canceled and all spring sports getting canceled. I don't really think anyone-- or maybe they have started thinking about what happens with the basketball season. I went to UConn. They're joining a new conference next year. I don't know if that conference schedule will happen. Is basketball too far away for some of these ADs to really be giving it serious thought?
PETER THAMEL: I think basketball is going to end up downwind of football. So if football gets delayed, maybe March Madness becomes May Madness, Myles, right? There is less of an urgency to play all of basketball's regular season just because it's such a financial difference than football.
And football when you talk to ADs, they're like, we need to play 12 football games. There is not the same we need to play 31 regular season basketball games. They do need to play the tournament for the future of the sport and for everything. So they're going to do everything possible to get the NCAA tournament in.
And, you know, the question in football-- and it will become in the tournament-- is will there be fans? How will fans look, because obviously for the NCAA, that's their biggest moneymaker. So just the thought of cramming 70,000 people in a dome to watch a basketball game right now doesn't appear very realistic. So those are big questions that will end up dominos from where football falls on the landscape.
MYLES UDLAND: All right, Pete Thamel with Yahoo Sports. Great to get your thoughts on this. Thanks for joining us today.