Unverified Voracity Speculates

Various seasons that may or may not happen. Per Penn State's rivals site, sources detail the hypothetical spring season:

- A pre-set eight-game schedule will begin the week after New Year's Day, likely kicking off on Wednesday, Jan. 7 or Thursday, Jan. 8, and progressing through the weekend.

- The goal will be to not have games overlapping with each other, opening up multiple television windows to various broadcast partners.

- Every team would have one bye weekend.

- No games would be held on campuses, instead moving the entirety of the schedule to neutral sites, which are still to be determined.

- A conference championship game between the top finishers in the East and West divisions would take place the second weekend in March at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.

Additionally, sources indicate that there is also a possibility, with the occurrence of a similar "spring" season for the Pac-12, that the two conferences could pit their champions against each other for a traditional Rose Bowl.

If there was not contemporaneous football it would be fairly easy to have games that don't overlap and still play on the weekends. You'd have to dodge some NFL playoff games early. Moving games to neutral sites, presumably so that they can be indoors, is reasonable since it's unlikely many or any fans would be in attendance.

There's also a proposal for a season that starts around Thanksgiving:

According to two college football people familiar with the Big Ten, those talks have generated a new option, starting a Big Ten season of at least eight games the week of Thanksgiving.

This appears to be a modified version of the above plan that hinges on the availability of a rapid-result saliva test that was recently approved by the FDA. The existence of such a test is a game-changer for a lot of activities. In football's case it allows morning tests and afternoon practices that would not have COVID-positive players breathing all over everything. The current situation is untenable for many reasons, foremost amongst them that things like this happen:

"We lose all but one person at a position group — a major position group on the field — and we have to practice that day with a position where we had multiple players on the field at one time and we had one player there," Riley said.

A rapid test would prevent that except in the case of a false negative.

[After THE JUMP: disaster brewing]

Meanwhile on campus. Strong possibility the fall semester at Michigan ends up a farce everyone could see coming. The Daily has a number of unsettling articles. RAs organize and ask for better protection, and in the middle of a chaotic meeting this exchange happens:

“I know I think we say a lot that we appreciate you all, and we wouldn’t be able to do this without you,” Clay said. “But I feel like this moment would be remiss to not acknowledge what I hear is concern and pain and care and passion in your voice, whoever you are, so I just wanted to take a moment to share.”

One RA said many of the leadership’s responses deflected RA concerns, saying it seemed like administrators were filibustering for time.

“I understand why all of you are saying ‘Thank you for doing this, and thank you to the RAs for doing that,’ but it’s simply wasting time to do that when we really would appreciate it more if you would answer our questions,” they said.

Housing precautions at move-in are unenforced, and the context Michigan is operating is contrasted with other schools:

Even on paper, the University has taken a less aggressive approach than other universities. By opening at about 70 percent capacity while closing all shared spaces, the measures that the University is taking puts its residential plan in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “more risk” category.

Bowdoin College has reduced its capacity down to 40% and is requiring residents to be tested every other day during move-in and twice per week throughout the semester. Harvard University has instituted a phased introduction to campus for its residents that requires students to have three negative tests. The University of California Berkeley has converted all of its rooms to single occupancy. Michigan State University has told students they shouldn’t return to campus.

Dorms at 70% capacity with communal bathrooms: doomy doom doom. Also:

“They never went over the rules,” Topf said. “There’s no one in the halls making sure people don’t go into other people's rooms. There’s a big group of freshmen sitting in a circle close to each other with no masks on."

If this devolves into the fiasco it looks like it certainly will it's time to start seriously questioning the university's current leadership. All of this is predictable by anyone with a basic understanding of human behavior.

Meanwhile in basketball existing. The Pac-12 axed it until at least January. The Big Ten did not make a formal decision about it. It does sound like the NCAA is going to attempt to proceed, and even the Pac-12 might be rolling it back. In the aftermath of the Pac-12 cancelling winter sports until January 1st, B10 basketball coaches acted quickly:

Within 48 hours of the Pac-12 canceling basketball until January, sources told CBS Sports that all 14 men's basketball coaches in the Big Ten convened on a conference call and passionately voted 14-0 to send a direct message to Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren that they did not want to see their league suffer a similar fate as the Pac-12's coaches.

Basketball is considerably more feasible than football because of the limited number of participants, particularly if there's a point-of-contact test in common use. It does sound like the season will be delayed:

The NCAA is considering four potential start dates for the 2020-21 men's and women's college basketball seasons, sources told CBS Sports, with two dates having gained the most traction leading into significant voting decisions in the coming week.

Nov. 25 and Dec. 4 are at this point considered the preferred dates. One source indicated to CBS Sports that Nov. 25 has a slight edge over Dec. 4.

Whether it's a bubble or a testing regime I'd give basketball a much better shot at existing than football, what with its chaos and 85 Rutgers persons instead of 13. Andrew Kahn points out that if the season starts after Thanksgiving, when many fall semesters are scheduled to end, that they'll have a "natural bubble" with the other students gone.

The lawyers get paid. Nebraska players have filed a lawsuit against the Big Ten. For various reasons, their chances of success are slim.

1. Can parents successfully sue a conference, such as the Big Ten, to release records?

The short answer: Probably not.

This thing is asking for various records that may not exist:

To that end, the parents press for tallies of votes, minutes from meetings, audio and video recordings, medical information used to reach a decision to cancel and various other sources of information. The letter warns Warren that unless the records are turned over, the parents “will have no choice” but to file a federal lawsuit on Aug. 24.

And if they did exist they would be subject to FOIA, and FOIA requests have already been filed. The real reason this lawsuit has been filed: the lawyer who filed it is a state senator up for election.

Seems bad! Will Wade and LSU basketball's case has been passed to the "Independent Accountability Resolution Process, which is a new thing for particularly complex cases. Complex, in this case, means many ins, many outs:

The NCAA says LSU men's basketball coach Will Wade either arranged for or offered "impermissible payments" to at least 11 potential recruits or others around them, according to documents obtained Wednesday by ESPN.

The documents say the NCAA's enforcement staff received information that Wade "arranged for, offered and/or provided impermissible payments, including cash payments, to at least 11 men's basketball prospective student-athletes, their family members, individuals associated with the prospects and/or nonscholastic coaches in exchange for the prospects' enrollment at LSU."

LSU didn't fire the guy and in fact doubled down even after an FBI investigation caught him talking about a "damn strong offer" to a recruit, so if there's ever going to be a situation where the NCAA burns a program to the ground this will be it. I mean:

"Many of those factors are triggered by the actions of Will Wade, head men's basketball coach at Louisiana State University," Duncan wrote. "Some of his underlying actions gave rise to this case and his tactics during the investigation have delayed resolution dramatically. He is employed in a leadership position at LSU, yet the institution has been unable to secure his full cooperation and is accountable for his behavior."

This is a direct middle finger to the NCAA. I don't have any allegiance to amateurism but I do think a society in which rules are completely ignored for the self-aggrandizement of a select group of rich people would be a bad one to live in. You know, hypothetically.

Etc.: Jake Butt's giving it one more try after years of knee injuries. Getting hockey back: everyone's top priority. Sports Illustrated deathwatch continues. Ann Arbor small businesses aren't doing real well. Frankie Collins profiled.