The College Football Playoff's management committee -- the 10 FBS conference commissioners plus Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick and CFP executive director Bill Hancock -- held a conference call with Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, and the call seemed to cement into official policy that college football will not be played without students on campus.
"Our players are students. If we're not in college, we're not having contests," Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told CBS Sports.
"Our message was, we need to get universities and colleges back open, that we were education-based programs, and we weren't going to have sports until we had something closer to normal college going on."
The purpose of the call seemed to be to educate Pence on the state-of-play in college athletics. Previously, College Sports, Inc., has not been included in calls between major sports commissioners and President Trump.
“I am grateful to the vice president for taking the time to talk to us,” Hancock told Yahoo. “It shows that the White House understands how significant college athletics is to folks in this country.”
Absent a single czar atop the sport, the 10 commissioners plus Swarbrick and Hancock serve as oligarchs that run the sport on behalf of the Power 5 universities, and the fact that the group informed Pence that football won't be played without students on campus is about as official as this policy is going to get.
With the policy now more or less written in stone, the watch will now turn to see if major universities open their campuses for the fall semester or not. If they do, we'll have football when God intended it to be played. If not, we won't.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.