With no one in charge, who can act to save college football season? | Estes

Years from now, we’re hopefully going to look back on the chaos in college football – player protests and opt-outs, troubling allegations of coaching misconduct, the threat of financial carnage, an entire season on the brink of not happening – and say we learned something. Maybe it’ll be a turning point.

Because we didn’t just get here today.

Much like unprepared governmental efforts – overwhelmed state unemployment offices, for instance – or a health care system long beset by problems, this pandemic hasn’t just exacerbated vulnerabilities. It has exposed them.

In big-time college sports, too, a lack of unified national leadership and a reluctance for years to make tough – but necessary – decisions has created an entity that is proving incapable of handling what it’s facing now.

The Detroit Free Press reported Monday that Big Ten school presidents have decided against playing football this season. A Big Ten spokesman said no vote had yet been taken, but once the league's decision is announced, it looks to be a point of no return. Sooner or later, you'd expect administrators throughout the FBS will sense they have no choice but to do it, too. So it goes when dominos start falling in college athletics, a world forever looking for someone else to make tough decisions.

Momentum toward this football season being postponed or canceled has been building for a while, though it seemed to grow unstoppable over the weekend, coming across through off-the-record text exchanges and ensuing media tweets.

It wasn't a drumbeat as much as ominously speculative – yet self-fulfilling, in a way – hysteria, the kind that accompanies a leadership void and inadequate communication and direction.

In response, college football players lobbied on social media to be able to play.

But who, exactly, were they appealing to? Big Ten presidents? Their own schools?

No one knows who is in charge of all this. Because no one actually is.

The NCAA has offered nothing substantive – at least publicly – during this pandemic. It’s easy to point fingers toward Indianapolis, but the NCAA is only a construct of its member universities that haven't wanted much oversight.

In some ways, the setup is similar to how a commissioner in pro sports works for team owners. Some pro commissioners, though, have stepped up as strong leaders during all this, which allowed mountains to be moved (see the NBA and NHL) in order to play safely in bubble environments.

But NCAA president Mark Emmert on Friday sounded defeated and unconstructive, noting that, "Everybody wants fall sports to return. But we can't do it unless we can find a way to do it with minimized risk for these young people."

Sure. How do colleges get there? For Emmert, that has been the schools' problem to solve, not his.

Full-scale bubbles might not be realistic in college sports, but who among the NCAA's many committees has advocated for cost-effective, original ways to help isolate players during the season, things like creating shared living spaces, loosening rules to allow for benefits or the ability to drastically lighten a semester’s course load or take only online classes?

Can’t do that, though. They’re not employees. They’re students.

Stuffy ideals of amateurism in college sports have long been outdated. They’ve become greedy and hypocritical as tuition rates keep going up while universities spend excessively on football programs – from million-dollar coaching contracts and buyouts to huge staffs to lavish facility upgrades – all the while insisting athletes shouldn’t profit from their own celebrity because, you know, “amateurism.”

Years of unwillingness to budge on amateurism concerns or curb the in-house spending has helped put college football in a bad place now.

It has limited flexibility in creating – and affording – solutions that could have kept teams much safer in trying to play. Such a tumultuous time also has given way to organized movements among players that are about much more than the pandemic. Players are raising issues that are long overdue, the product of cans being habitually kicked ahead without effective leadership and a cohesive strategy.

So little ever changes, it seems, in major college sports because it's every conference or school for itself. This creates a timid environment where everyone wants someone else to accept responsibility for difficult decisions, especially controversial, unpopular ones. It’s for fear of legal ramifications and how it might look publicly if they do it.

Then when someone does step up and take charge, others are then far too eager to follow. It’s for fear of legal ramifications and how it might look publicly if they don’t.

This is how the Big Ten preemptively canceled nonconference games for other leagues.

Never mind the absurdity in suggesting it’s any safer for Florida’s team to travel nearly 1,000 miles to play Texas A&M in College Station than it would be to drive 150 miles to play Florida State.

Never mind the fallout of nonconference cancellations on other FBS conferences, either.

What triggered growing buzz toward cancelation this weekend was a decision by the Mid-American Conference to not play this fall. It was for health and safety, they said, though we know it also had a lot to do with the financial impact of losing nonconference games and the Power Five payouts for playing.

Cancelation might be the best thing. There are good reasons.

But the point is that this challenge was nothing new. Universities have known for months how difficult it would be to play football safely in 2020. A task this difficult needed to be a collective effort among conferences, everyone working together to make it happen, helping others, examining options that college sports never did.

Short of that, you would have at least hoped conferences could be on the same page, given that the actions of one so greatly impact the others.

The MAC should not be determining whether the SEC ends up opting to play football. And yet, here we are.

So many important decisions being made reactively, based on fear and covering one’s behind.

So few proactive moves that could have helped before it was too late.

This was college football in 2020. 

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