Spring football is dumb. Don’t do it. 2020 is a bust. .. Time to prepare for 2021.
Spring football will go over like ham sandwiches at an Eid al-Fitr. If you can't play football in '20, let's just wait for '21.
Spring football brings particular challenges to Big Ten part of the country. Foremost, the Wunhan coronavirus probably will rage ever more intensely during wintertime, spreading rapidly through apartment buildings, university dormitories, classrooms, office buildings, and any other indoor venue with more than a few persons.
Second, the weather in the north is horrible during “spring.” Unless the universities want to delay the beginning their football season, usually the basis of autumn-semester campus entertainment and chatter, to April, May, or even later, they must contend with ice, blowing snow, heavy snow, bitter cold, and other awful winter weather. These elements of winter weather tend to snarl travel plans, but these universities tend to have infrastructure to cope in snowplows, airports, and more if the people who run them are still working and not stuck at home because of the Wuhan coronavirus.
But have they thought stadium-scale snow removal and field maintenance? In the autumn semester, most institutions must keep their football fields playable only through November, and few schools host more than two games after the first of November. Grass simply cannot grow in persistent subfreezing cold, so the players will tear up the field repeatedly. In the Southeastern conference, this new schedule probably would mean plenty of cold-rain games and the field degrading into a mud pit, but excellent field crews can mitigate this problem. In the Big Ten, it’s an ice-crusted, frozen-solid surface that slowly degenerates into a grass-free cold mud. Are they prepared? Can they prepare?