We all pretty much know the stakes by now. It’s an uphill battle at best for college football as we know it to be played in the fall of 2020.
Despite that, if there’s a chance to put collegiate football players on the field at some point over the next 12 months, it’s going to happen. Maybe the season starts late, maybe it’s truncated, perhaps it’s punted all the way to the spring but, to borrow a phrase, if there’s a way, it will happen.
Because it’s hard to imagine college sports existing without a 2020 football season in some form.
“We are planning to develop several different budget scenarios for next year. I don’t think any of them will be pretty,” Florida State AD David Coburn told an FSU Board of Trustees teleconference on Friday, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
“One of them will be a scenario without football and I would just say God help us if that is the scenario.”
Coburn said Florida State is already looking at the least painful ways to cut costs -- be it by cutting travel, and perhaps changing scheduling practices in non-revenue sports to play more games closer to Tallahassee.
Coburn also said Florida State lost in the neighborhood of $2.5 million with the cancelation of the ACC and NCAA tournaments. He did not speculate how much FSU would lose if there was no football season, but it seems clear that the loss would be in the mid-to-high eight figures.
That’s likely true across the board, but local circumstances -- namely, the costs of firing Willie Taggart and hiring Mike Norvell -- make any revenue shortfalls even more painful for the ‘Noles.
