The Ringer NFL Show - The Big Ten and Pac-12 Cancel Fall Football Seasons | The Ringer NFL Show

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

The Big Ten, Pac-12, and several smaller conferences have announced they are canceling their fall sports seasons. We discuss what this means for college football's immediate and long-term future, what will happen to the remaining Power Five conferences, what college football will look like when it returns, how this impacts the NFL season, the NFL draft, college prospects, and more.  Host: Kevin Clark Guest: Rodger Sherman and Danny Kelly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's the ringer NFL show, part of the owner podcast network. I am Kevin Clark. It is an emergency. Ringer NFL show, a strange and I wish you could say historic day in course history. College football, the Big Ten and the Pack 12 have announced they will not be playing this fall. TPD on every other Power 5 conference of previously the Mac in the Mountain West as well as other

smaller conferences have scrapped the fall season. But to break it down, Roger Sherman on college football, Danny Kelly, on the draft. We'll start with you, Roger. You are a college football expert. I used to be. I am not now. You know a lot more than me. The future of college football, if you're looking at this from a 2023, 20204, 2025 standpoint, and we'll get to the immediate implications now.

But what is this change about college football and amateurism and the entire structure? Yeah, obviously it's tough because last week, last week the Big Ten announced their schedule and then today they canceled it. So projecting till 2023 is hard. But it feels to me like, originally the plan was to play a season in 2020 because that was the thing which, you know,

could help save the college football system that could keep money flowing into the coffers of these big institutions for months and months on end. It was assumed that was the thing that could sort of keep college athletics going despite this pandemic that has lost them hundreds of millions of dollars. But in the past month or so, maybe the past couple weeks, it felt like the people in charge of college football, realize they need to change more about the system to play a season this year. It seemed like there's no way they could really play a season safely with the players on campus, interacting with students. Any way that you could bubble them off would clearly not be amateur football. It seemed to be like there's no way that all 130 FBS teams could play this year.

Any football season this year would almost certainly be the game. the power conferences, which could have led to some sort of big rift between the power conferences and everybody else that could get even farther separated apart. And then the players spoke up. The players spoke up and said, some of them said, you know, we want certain health and safety regulations put in place. Others said we want to play when it looked like things got canceled. But generally, they were just demanding a seat at the table, which is something that college football currently doesn't have a place for. And I wonder if punting on this season now and losing hundreds of millions of dollars is actually the thing that makes football in 2024, 2025 look

sort of somewhat like it already does. On the other hand, I don't think the players are going to go back and just accept whatever colleges give from them now on. It seems like players have been radicalized to a certain extent by this, maybe radicalizes a strong word, but they realize how much power they have. They've heard the administrators talk about how much money they stand to lose from not playing college football. They understand their value. And the next time football is played, I think the players will want more. And it feels to me like this sport is growing towards a world where you have colleges sitting down at a table with a college football player. And it feels to me like this sport. Association and negotiating and actually treating them like somewhat professional athletes

where for decades it's been pretended that they're not. Okay. So it's a lot to unpack there. I want to get to some of it in a second. No, no, no, no, no. That was great. That's why we booked you. But I want to just get your prediction on what happens from here in the next couple of weeks.

Is there, you know, as you said, all the Power 5 conferences talked about their schedule last week and, oh, we're only going, you know, 10, 10 games or whatever it is. No out of conference stuff or one out of one out of conference game, whatever it is. And then obviously they scrap that within a week in some cases. Does the ACC and the SEC press on? Do they wait to the last second? Do they try to delay it? Not until spring, but until mid-October or whatever it is. What happens from here short-term, Roger? There's this funny thing happening right now where two of the Power 5 conferences have canceled and two have doctors that they say football is fine. And the fifth, the Big 12 is sort of the swing vote. And if the Big 12 cancels, it's going to look stupid for everyone else. And another thing about the long-term future of college football is everyone has realized how totally disorganized this is, how ridiculous it is that there's no governing body that can step in and say

things should be this way, things should be that way. It's been that way for so long because college football is just this big massive sport with you can say it has 130 power 150 FBS teams.

You could include every school in the NCAA as part of college football. In fact, I think they would like it if you associated the powerhouses with like the tiny division three schools. That makes it seem like everyone is part of the same boat. But they pretend that they were all part of the same boat.

Now everyone's pulling it in different directions. And it feels like, again, whenever college football does exist again, there will need to be some sort of more organization than this. This is ridiculous, just having every conference come up with their own decisions when it's time for them. The disorganization over the last five months, you know, you talk about, how much prep time the NFL has had to figure out things. It seems like they actually did make some decisions on how to do things.

The college football generally just waited and waited and waited and waited and waited until it's August. And it's time to release your schedule and also cancel the season in the same week. So I kind of feel like this is the consequences of everything college football is built over the last couple of decades. Yes. They have a leader, and I put leader in huge quotation marks, huge comic oversized quotation marks around Mark Emert, who is decided that he's just going to, you know, you guys got it. I'm just going to be over here collecting my huge paycheck and I'll let you guys decide. I said on this podcast a couple weeks ago that Mark Emert makes Gary Bettman look like Winston Churchill. And I would say that that remains true.

Gary Bettman, by the way, just sneakily crushing it with the bubble up in Canada, just elite. commissioner work for him in 2020. But this is a rudderless, leaderless sport. And there's been no vision beyond, let's get a bunch of money, pay coaches a bunch of money, build these huge facilities and say that that's benefiting the player somehow. They've always been terrified of player associations slash player unions, players associations, whatever that is, which might be, you know, obviously, we've seen that being suggested and hinted out the last couple of days by players who have basically talked about it openly on

Twitter. And so I'm not surprised that when the feeder to the fire here, that there's nothing for college programs really to do except cancel. I am intrigued to see what happens with football going forward in 2021. Roger and Danny, we'll get to you in a second with draft stuff. Do you think, let's say there's a vaccine and things can be. they can play a normal season in 2021. What does that look like? Do things go back to normal? Or is there just a ton of turmoil and negotiation and all that stuff over the next 12 months?

It's too soon to know. It's very clear that everyone in this sport, everyone who has power in the sport just wants things to be exactly the same, which is why they just waited. Well, that's stakeholders in every corner of the world. Anybody who has power and money wants things to remain the same. That's how that power and money work. And the question is whether the players change that because they've been told how much their value is publicly. Because they can get power and money and they should get it because they're the players

and they are the people that people watch, okay? And when you, when, you know, you have these athletic directors come out and say, we're going to lose $120 million if we don't play college football this year, it makes you think what would happen if the college football players didn't play college football in future years. You would have to listen to them. Right. As for what, if there was a vaccine, it's very clear to be that they just would have, they tried as hard as they could to make this season go off as plans.

You know, you didn't see teams changing their conference schedules until a couple of. weeks ago, even having had four months of lead time. You still today have conferences that with half of the teams in FBS have about out of the season. And you still have conferences that feasibly think that they can play in spite of everything we know about the pandemic, in spite of all that stuff that's happening in this world, it makes it clear that they're not going to be able to do things normally. Why do you just bust out laughing?

Have you become the Joker? It's not funny. I don't know why. You just became the Joaquin Phoenix Joker in the middle of a podcast about pandemic college football. I'm not happy at all, by the way. I just want to play down. You're only confirming the bit more and more.

I'm going to stop you right there because Danny Kelly and I are about to nerd out on the draft and what happens from here. So I paneled a couple of GMs. Are you just going to keep deep sighing, Roger, for the rest of the puns? Yeah, I just want to go on the record that like one of the reasons we write about sports is because we really like them. And it makes me very sound. There's a college football. Right. Okay.

Danny, I paneled some GMs, talk to some other folks in the sport this morning. I think a couple things. Number one, scouts are still going to have a job to do. They're going to watch 2019 film. Unfortunately, as Joe Burrow has said himself, there is no possibility of a Joe Burrow emerging this year, a guy we weren't talking about in August, and all of a sudden is nailed on number one pick in January.

That won't be happening. It's steeply unfair to a lot of people, but also, it's deeply unfair to rookies this year that a lot of guys weren't able to have rookie tryouts or that they were cut before they even stepped on, you know, an NFL facility. It's just a deeply unfair year. And that extends well beyond sports into humanity, quite frankly.

Now, scouts will overanalyze 2019. They will be able to, there will be workouts and kind of unofficial games played between now and then, whether that's All-Star games or Seven on Sevens. I mean, there will be ways for evaluation to happen. And then I think beyond that, I think you're going to have college coaches be in demand as consultants. And that's something I've talked to a bunch of people about this morning. What does that look like?

Does Lincoln Riley link up with a team for the next four months, you know, with a huge paycheck or whatever it is? And I think there's just ways that the sport changes dramatically and the way, listen, if Lincoln Riley comes into the sport for four months, he's going to do some things schematically

that will have an impact on the sport and the pro game. And I think it's something to watch. But Danny, you're a draft guru. you do lists, you watch tape and you come up with everything. This will change your life how if there's no college football. Well, I mean, I guess first of all, you just have to rely on far less tape with a lot of guys, you know, players who, you know, maybe didn't have full-time roles that were going to have big roles this year.

You know, they were never going to get that tape. You're going to have guys that, you know, every year guys make this huge jump going either from like their sophomore to their junior year or junior to senior year. you're not going to have guys that are able to do that. So I think that's going to be obviously the most obvious and big thing. But then there's also just the less information, you know, a big part of, I think, the scouting, you know, the NFL draft industrial complex is information is so valuable. You have coaches. So you have scouts going around the country talking to coaches.

You have, you know, scouts talking to trainers, all this stuff going into the weight room and talking to these guys. you know, there's, if the pandemic is still happening, you're not going to have scouts on the road at all, you know, because it's just too dangerous or whatever. And so it's going to be, I think the real interesting part is going to be kind of like, the teams that have the best information channels are going to be the ones that have an advantage in this draft cycle because, you know, their relationships with college coaches, they're, they're established channels of communication with people that know these players better than, a lot of these teams will ever know them now. And there's probably going to be a lot greater emphasis put on, like the combine, assuming it happens on time and the senior bowl, things like that, where you're just going in and you're having very limited interaction with these people and hoping to kind of get the most out of that. So it just, bottom line, it changes everything.

And information is going to be at a real premium, I think, this offseason just based on everything that's happening. Okay. So let's back up here. This will not impact all that much, Trevor Lawrence from Clemson. This will not impact all that much Justin Fields from Ohio State. If you were to psych a circle a couple of prospects where it does change things, elite prospects, whether that's Trey Lance or somebody else, who had question marks or on the other side, who was going to break out this year and you thought was going to get into that top five,

what are some prospects that are really feeling it today as far as that goes? That's a really good question. The first guy that came to my mind, and, you know, there's a ton of them probably, but Thailand Wallace, you know, is a guy that was on track to potentially be like a first round pick in the draft this last year, Torres ACL. So, you know, guys that are coming off like major injuries that were looking like they're on track to be elite prospects, you know, last draft, you know, that kind of that potential could hurt them a lot this year. And so I'm just thinking the first thing that I thought

was just guys coming off injury that were really hoping to get that momentum, have big season, push themselves up from a second round type player into like a top 10 type player. So that was kind of like the first thing that came to mind. And there's just there's a, you know, there's dozens and dozens of guys that are going to have that effect. But, you know, just a player like that is kind of the first thing I thought of. Yeah. I mean, it's it's going to be fascinating to watch. whether or not guys can rise their stocks over the next six months. And if there's anything they can do to improve on what people saw on tape in 2019.

Roger, from a team perspective. When you talk about- Are there programs, and you should unmute yourself at some point, there you go. We're going to get through this. Are there teams that you think, and obviously safety and health is the most important thing, but are there teams that had a lot to lose with the cancellation today that you think we'll never either we're going to be contenders and normally aren't or get you know super teams you thought we're going to we're going to fly to the national championship who who who lost today

in that regard roger it's just sad thinking about um i mean ohio state obviously is it going to get to probably is it going to have justin fields ever again um clemson probably is it going to have trevor lawrence again those are powerhouses that you think could probably rebuild um i was just thinking about, you know, it's, we keep bringing up Joe Burrow as an example of someone, but we've really seen year after year after year, you know, Kyler Baker, Kyler. Guys who had quote unquote question marks. Yeah, guys who had quote unquote question marks of NFL scouts who over the course of the year played their way into not having question marks.

Right. Crushed it. Crushed them. Yeah. Yeah. It's Everyone is Roger, are you okay, buddy?

Not really. Not really. Okay. It's a very strange thing. Even when it, when like you can prep for it for like six months and you've been, you know,

writing about it for six months, it's still weird to just see like wide swads of the sport just go away. I, I haven't gotten used to it yet, even though I've been thinking about it for five months. This episode is brought to you by CBS All Access. Live sports are finally back, and CBS All Access is letting you cheer on the world's best players

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no satellite required, and get every out-of-market live. game every Sunday afternoon. Go online to NFL sending ticket. TV now to see if you're eligible. Pro tip, use promo code the ringer at checkout to say 15%. You know, Kurt Kherb Street just randomly saying there was going to know college football like six months ago

and everyone getting mad at him and then him being completely correct. I mean, like, there were some people early on who saw this coming. And I actually was more optimistic. I've always thought the NFL was going to play, but I thought there was going to be, I just things are going to be different in the country by now back in March and April. And I just didn't anticipate this. But again, this is the world the college football is built in the sense that they've done the whole student athlete thing. And they can't say, all right, guys,

let's come to campus and put them in a bubble because that would destroy the thing they hold most sacred, which is not giving players power or money. Yeah, the NFL players get to say we'd like to, you know, get to sign off on health regulations. Well, there's also financial incentive to do so. They got a stake, yes, yes. And none of that has existed for college football players. And it's, you know, it's ethically so just the idea of having unpaid athletes go out specifically because you need the money. As sad as I am not to have a season, the idea of the ethics behind making unpaid college football players play because you're going to have a budget shortfall during a pandemic.

when you keep seeing, you know, we've already had hundreds of college football players get COVID-19 when they came back to campus. It happened, you know, over 30 at Clemson, you know, breakout at Rutgers, breakouts at schools across the country. And I suspect a lot of people said in a lot of people said in the past few days, it's safer to keep them on campus. But basically, as soon as players got back to campus, you saw these outbreaks happen. So I don't think that that was a true arguing point. Nicole Arbach reported that there were 10 players at least in the big 10 who had the rare hard condition associated with it. I mean, there were huge liability risks and I think that you can't overlook that. Danny Kelly, you were saying something? Yeah, I was just going to interject.

Like I brought up Tylon Wallace from Oklahoma State and he, you know, technically the season is still on the table for some of these conferences. Is it not? Like are we putting the cart before the horse here and I guess, Roger, you're assuming everything. You follow it more. closely than I do, but I don't, I think even if they start playing, we're not going to see, you know, 10 games or whatever. I don't know. Roger, where do you fall in that? Yeah, I think it's once actual college students show up on these college campuses, it's going to be pretty impossible for any team to have a team of uninfected football players. Like, if people are going to class and going to parties and stuff like that,

and you'd have to bubble them off. It just seems like, like even if they try to play, the way infection spiked on campus, like Clemson came back with, I think, two infected players, and then soon it was 37, just because they were all around each other and all being near, you know,

that's how it spreads through when we talk to each other and we meet each other. And it just feels like college campuses are not a great place to be in, in a type of pandemic. Okay, so, Danny, scouts now have no game film to go on that's not less than a year old.

What can they do? You know a lot of scouts, you know a lot of decision makers. What things become more important now? Is it interviews? Is it hitting up coaches? What is going to be valued in March of next year

that is not typically as valued in a normal year where those game film? I mean, I think it's all. of the above. You mentioned it. There's going to be, like, the face-to-face interviews, maybe there's going to be more focused put on that, like, trying to figure out who they are as a person. I saw some interesting tweets from Jordan Rodriguez, the athletic, talking about how now teams may be forced to even look at the analytics from some of these guys.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard that too. You could even get into, yeah, like, you know, the statistical analytics, you could talk about things like breakout age, which is a huge deal in fantasy football. football, maybe these things start to have a higher impact, you know, with these teams that can't rely just on the tape. Because everybody, it's the old cliche in scouting is like, oh, it's all about the tape. But you're not, you're not going to have tape from these guys for over a year. You know, these guys aren't going to have been on the field for that long. And so you have to maybe rely more heavily on things like that. It's, it's, like, scouting is almost like, you know,

the espionage thing where you're, you're talking to people figuring out, you know, secrets or, or, getting inside slants on who these guys really are and how good they can actually be. So, yeah, I think it's going to be, is a whole new ballgame for them and they might be forced to, you know, adopt sort of, I guess, the new age stuff like analytics and things like that a little bit more. Roger, Urban Meyer was on Big Ten Network and he was asked about spring football and he said, quote, no chance, which I tend to agree with. Any chance that either of these sports, or excuse me, either of these conferences play in the spring, or do you think it's just no chance until next September?

It's tough to see what could change between now and then. It doesn't seem like we'll have a vaccine in the next four months. I mean, that will be widely spread. And if we did, that it would go to college football players. That's like three or four things that seem unlikely. There's also the idea of if you play a season in spring, they might not be able to play four months later in fall. And are you just going to forever play in spring from now on?

It doesn't seem like it. I don't feel like it's going to happen. I got excited like last week when only the Mac had canceled and like the Mac was like, we're going to play in spring. And I was like, that'd be like a nice little, nice fun, fun activity to have going on in spring, just like how it's all of a sudden fun to have to have. the NBA in August. But no, it doesn't seem like there will be half a college football season

in fall, half a college football season in spring. It seems like eventually everyone's just going to not do it. How sad? Yeah, we were talking about this a little bit before the show. You were making fun of me for being sad earlier. And now I'm still, I'm still, I'm still making fun of you. Go ahead, Danny. I was just saying we were talking about this a little bit before the show too. It's like what, you know, in terms of the guys like Trevor Lawrence or Justin Fields or any of these big name guys that we know are going to be like first round draft picks, high draft picks, these guys are probably going to be incentivized to not play, you know, in if they ever do have spring ball or whatever, because they're going to be so focused on training for the traffic. No chance. No chance. If you're, if you're even a draft pick at all in it maybe what, the top three rounds, you have no incentive. And then. does it become illegitimate? The scouts watch it less. Do they glean from it less if there's no first round picks or second round picks in the field?

I think there's a lot of questions to be answered. Roger, I want to go back to something you said because I really wasn't making fun of you because I used to adore college football. But honestly, this is the human element is something you can't ignore. People are going to lose jobs over this. And it's not going to be Davos-Swinney and Lincoln Riley. And is Clay Hilton still the USC coach?

Yes. and probably for a lot longer than he's supposed to be now. Okay, all right. But those guys aren't going to lose their jobs. Those guys probably aren't even going to take pay cuts. It's going to be the people who don't have leverage, who are at the bottom of the corporate pecking order, so to speak, in these other departments who will lose their jobs.

You have to take pay cuts or have to furlough. Just decent people who had no say in any of this stuff. And so the human element is really important. this will change college sports forever. They will probably not employ as many people. And there are things that need to be done to college athletics. They need to pay the players. They need to give them likeness rights.

They need to give them more freedom. They need to let them on social media, which some teams don't let them do. But I think that there are people who are going to really suffer from this, and it's not the people who built the system. And I think that's important to remember. And this is a sad day for those people. Anything else, guys?

It's the reason they wanted to play is because of how much money this is going to cost. There are going to be so many schools that, you know, were able to sponsor other varsity sports because of the money they get from football. We've already seen cuts in that department. Like you said, jobs, you know, and the players who are going to the NFL are the lucky ones. it's the ones who aren't going to have senior seasons, et cetera, et cetera. The ones who are going pro and something other than sports? The NCAA wants us to feel bad for them,

wants us to be happy for that most of the time, and they are now sad. No, listen, this is a sad day for a lot of people. These guys want to play, and it's not safe for them to do so. They love football. And that's the thing that I always come back to on this stuff, is that we all sit here and say, well, these players should opt out,

of these players, and if you want to opt out, great. And I support that if it's the best thing for you and your family or you want to. It doesn't matter to me. But I would say most of the football the only way you get to play for Ohio State or you get to play for USC or Cal or Stanford is that you work your ass off. And I mean, go ahead. Think about Trevor Lawrence. You know, he's the guy who when he played as a freshman, people said he could sit out the next two years and still be the number one picking the NFL draft. People suggested, you know, he doesn't need to play football anymore. And he actually turned out to be the most prominent voice of players saying, we need, we want to play this season, a guy with pretty much nothing to gain from actually playing in that season.

We do tend to think of like the game theory element of things in regards to that. Guys, guys, it's time for some game theory? Yeah, I agree with that. And that's, that's, that's the overarching thing. These guys love football. That's why they're here. And they want to play. And it's sad for them. It's sad for the people who will face the financial realities, which again are not the people who build this system. The people who build the system will continue to handsomely profit. And yeah, it's just a weird day. And I think it's an inflection point in the history of football because things that happen today will impact this NFL season and impact obviously the college season and the ripple effects will always be felt. I would say the same thing of high

school. You know, I think that the thing I wrote a couple of years ago about how the scheme world is flat is real and that they high school, college, and pro are becoming interchangeable schematically. And teams really might be able to get a high school coach in the building and have them draw stuff up. And we might see some different stuff on the football field this year. And I think that that's, it's going to be kind of a great equalizer because I think this is going to be very simplified stripped down type of year at the NFL level. But if you have spread college coaches coming in and drawing up their schemes or even high school guys who are kind of scheme lords, I think you're going to see some really interesting stuff.

All right, guys, anything else? Is the NFL going to play on Saturdays? I would, I would bet. I would bet that. Yeah. The weird thing is going to be if like one conference decides to roll with it. The SEC is trying really hard to make that happen. If the SEC tries to roll with it, do they, do they, does the NFL, like, we're still going at 8 p.m. Saturday night.

You guys get the afternoon. Mississippi State versus South Carolina. I was going to, the one thing I was going to add is, I think, long term, you know, in addition to the scheme stuff you were talking about, Kevin, it's going to be interesting to see if this, this year has any long term. I guess we'll never know, but it makes what's already a random thing in the NFL draft. so much more random, it feels like. And so teams could have these either disastrous drafts or amazing, amazing drafts, and it could change the entire power structure of the NFL

based on the next few years because the teams are drafting with so much less information. So that was the other thing I was just thinking about is it makes what's already a random, you know, process, or at least partially random, then it makes it that much more. There's just so many more variables now to think about.

This has been the Ringar and a Fellows Show on the Ringer Podcast Network. Rogers bummed out. I'm now bummed out. Danny Kelly, you bummed out? I mean, yes, I am. I am very much bummed out. Are your top 100 is due Friday? I know.

God, I got to go. Now there's no college football. We got to get the show on the road. All right. Thanks, guys.