What if the SEC is ready to play football and Vanderbilt is not? | Estes

As Southeastern Conference schools welcome football players back in the coming days for voluntary on-campus workouts, it will be no different at Vanderbilt.

The Commodores are going to be returning, too, according to athletics director Candice Storey Lee, as a part of the SEC's approval to do so June 8.

This is only a tentative, first step for the SEC. But it’s a significant one toward the league getting where it badly desires it to go — being able to play a 2020 season during a global pandemic. The drumbeat keeps building, bringing with it collective optimism. While comforting, that can’t help but seem a premature celebration.

Because the toughest decisions haven’t happened yet.

And when they do happen, they won’t be made collectively in college sports.

“Everybody is dealing with their own factors,” said Lee, “so I think we have to be realistic that everybody may not be in the same place come the fall. … Clearly, local context matters.”

Absolutely.

The local context you'll find in most SEC markets is basically going to be something like this: Heck yes, we're gonna be playing football. Aren't you?

The local context for Vanderbilt would be different, as is often the case.

So allow me to raise an honest question without casting judgment either way: What if 13 SEC schools are ready to play football — and Vanderbilt is not?

I’m not bringing this up to highlight a popular (and not wholly undeserved) perception that “It Just Means More” everywhere in the SEC except Vanderbilt, the league’s lone private university and standard-bearer for academics.

I also don’t mean to suggest Vanderbilt doesn’t want football season to happen. It definitely does. It wouldn’t be taking the steps to be able to bring football players back for workouts if it didn't.

Truth is, the Commodores' athletics department has sincere motivation to play. It would struggle like anyone else to make ends meet without football revenue. That’s the reality across the SEC and all of college football, and it understandably is going to pressure and shove college administrators hard in the direction of playing regardless of hurdles that may await.

“I don’t think any of us are really spending time modeling that (football season won’t happen), because that’s financially pretty catastrophic,” Lee said. “I think people are thinking about the possibility of having reduced capacity at your venues and how we respond to that. We’ll be nimble. You just have to be. There are so many questions and there’s not enough answers right now.”

The idea of towns like Auburn or Tuscaloosa or Athens or Oxford simply not having a football season is almost unthinkable, and that’s not just because of how passionate the fans are or the bottom line for the colleges. It could be devastating to local economies to not have games with people in attendance.

In Nashville, not as much. The metropolitan location of Vanderbilt’s campus means college football isn’t nearly as essential to the local economy.

But it presents other, unique obstacles. The idea of being able to safely gather thousands of people on Saturdays looks more challenging in a crowded portion of a major city than it might in a smaller college town.

Location is just one good reason Vanderbilt sets up as the most likely potential outlier — and dissenting voice — in what could be a fevered rush by the SEC to play football in 2020. Another is how schools have already approached the pandemic institutionally.

All but one of the 14 SEC universities has publicly announced firm plans for in-person classes in the fall. Vanderbilt has not.

Those 13 plans were introduced with varying degrees of force and confidence. But even at Auburn — which didn’t rush to announce its intentions — you had school president Jay Gogue offering a recorded video for students in mid-May that pledged, “We’re gonna have football this fall.”

Such a message might have been overly optimistic at an uncertain point.

But it was a clear message.

The nature of Vanderbilt’s path for returning, meanwhile, has been very Vanderbilt — a complicated series of steps or “phases” (different than the ones implemented by the city of Nashville, mind you) that say so much and yet nothing at all. Overriding caution is warranted, sure, but in trying to decode the jargon, it’s difficult to know where things stand for Vanderbilt's students in the fall, including its athletes.

Vanderbilt announced Wednesday that it was extending a deadline regarding off-campus housing arrangements until five days after “the public announcement of Vanderbilt’s plans for fall semester." 

“The university expects to make that announcement in the next few weeks,” VU’s statement said.

I hope this doesn't happen, but would anyone be shocked if Vanderbilt ended up ruling out in-person classes in the fall? Such a pre-emptive domino could rule out the Commodores’ football season before it even gets close to starting.

And, again, what happens then?

I reached out to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey to ask and received a polite denial from a spokesperson. To be fair, I’m not sure Sankey would have had a good answer. I don't think any athletics director would at this point. 

“That’s the million-dollar question that everybody wants to know: What if everybody can’t start at the same time?” Lee said. “If we have to deal with that reality, we will. Right now, our focus is just on phasing kids in safely because it’s an important step to try to get to the fall. …

“We’ve got the good fortune of time to give us more information — although the clock is ticking.”

Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.