Given the current state of the pandemic, perhaps a spring campaign for Syracuse football is the most-realistic option at this juncture.
As Syracuse football is in the midst of its summer work-outs, some states around the country are unfortunately seeing a surge in their number of COVID-19 cases.
That has prompted numerous teams, with Kansas out of the Big 12 Conference being one of the most-recent examples, to halt their voluntary work-outs.
Orange fans, myself included, of course want to see the 2020 campaign arrive this fall without any issues, but safety is the only priority here. Because it doesn’t appear that the novel coronavirus pandemic is diminishing anytime soon, there is certainly a lot of speculation that the 2020 term may not occur this fall.
One possible alternative, which is discussed in this ESPN.com article by Dave Wilson, centers on having a spring football season. In Wilson’s article, Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, one of the top head coaches in all of college football, is quoted as saying that a spring term is “very doable.”
Like many of his head-coaching colleagues, Riley prefers and is hopeful that a fall stanza can happen, but other options have to get considered as well, he says.
"“I just think it would be wrong of us to take any potential option off the table right now. I think it’d be very difficult to say the spring is not a potential option. I, for one, think it’s very doable,” Riley said in the ESPN.com story."
Wilson writes that should a spring season transpire, the schedule would likely have to get shortened. Riley notes that the spring alternative would “probably be a conference season and postseason only.”
Syracuse football could end up, like Orange hoops, only playing league tilts during its upcoming stanza.
This is similar in nature to what Iona head coach Rick Pitino floated as a potential option for basketball last week. Pitino suggests that the NCAA push back the beginning of the 2020-21 basketball campaign to early next year and have schools only suit up for conference contests.
Since the possibility exists that a coronavirus vaccine may be ready for use by the end of 2020 or early 2021, that is in part why some coaches in football and basketball are bringing up the idea of delaying their respective sports’ seasons for a few months, to give scientists and researchers more time in their initiatives.
I’ve said before that it would prove a bummer if Syracuse basketball only suited up for Atlantic Coast Conference battles in 2020-21, and I feel the same way about Syracuse football. But if these potential alternatives enable football and basketball to get played in some manner, then I would support eliminating non-conference games.