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Big Ten Pivots to Conference Only Schedule; Commissioner “Very Concerned”

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In what’s starting to look familiar to the situation a few months ago, earlier this week the Ivy League Conference announced that they would be suspending all sports play until at least the spring of 2021. And now on Thursday afternoon another major shoe dropped. The Big Ten announced that they will be pivoting to a conference-only scheduling model, throwing things into flux for numerous schools across the nation.

The Big Ten’s commissioner, Kevin Warren, said “We’re trying to figure out a way to play a season safely and responsibly. But we’re also prepared not to play,” in an interview with Sports Illustrated. In additional comments, Warren explained some of the logic behind the decision to move to conference-only play. “The biggest thing is that this affords us an opportunity to be nimble and agile in an uncertain time. It all ties back to the health and safety of our student-athletes. It’s easy for us to manage operations, the schedule and logistics when we’re focused on the Big Ten conference,” the commissioner told Yahoo. 

Warren would continue, saying “I am very concerned about the season, I’m an optimistic person, but I am very concerned. We want to take one step at a time.”

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The Big Ten was scheduled to play 36 non-conference opponents, including 28 FBS schools. Several major name schools will lose games against Big Ten opponents, including Michigan, BYU, and Oregon. The Mid-America Conference (MAC) is in significant trouble with the loss of the Big Ten’s non-conference schedule, 11 of the non-conference games were against teams in the financially struggling MAC. The economic impacts of lost games to small economies throughout the Midwest is going to have large ripple effects through the fall.

Additional ripples will no doubt be felt through college football as the other conferences attempt to figure things out. The ACC is expected to announce a pivot to a conference-only schedule in the near future as well.

It is anticipated that Notre Dame will join the ACC’s non-conference schedule, as the independent school scrambles to replace games lost to scheduling decisions. Other Power 5 conferences are still largely undecided, with the SEC unsurprisingly being the strongest hold-out for a full regular head-in-the-sand approach to the season.

The Power 5 was caught by surprise by the Big Ten’s decision. Despite numerous recent statements that the Power 5 conferences were working in concert to make the best decisions for all schools and for college football as a whole, the Big Ten appears to have arrived at their conclusion independently of their partners.

Many are also questioning the logic in the decision, with the thinking that if the issue is player safety, why play football at all? Which really makes a lot of sense if you think about it for half a second.

This is a very fluid situation with a lot more news coming soon, as schools and conferences grapple with what may and may not be possible with COVID-19 still ravaging the country and spread increasing in all but four U.S. states.

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