Today could -- maybe not will, but could -- live as one of the biggest days in the history of college sports. No games are being played, no championships are up for grabs, no winning streaks are on the line, no barriers will be broken. The turning point that could shape the future of college sports -- again, could -- happens to be... a Zoom meeting of a bunch of middle-aged suits spread across the country.
Let's break it down.
What's happening? The NCAA Board of Governors meets for a previously scheduled meeting. The agenda is public, and Item 4c is what we're interested in.
What is the Board of Governors? The NCAA is an organization constructed almost entirely of committees, councils and working groups, and the Board of Governors is its apex.
The Board of Governors is a 25-member panel comprised almost entirely of university presidents. On the roster you'll find names you'd expect, like the presidents of Kentucky, Colorado, Texas Tech and Ohio State. You'll also find names like Spalding University Tori Murden McClure, Emporia State president Allison Garrett and Hamline University president Fayneese Miller.
This is the group that connects the entire organization -- from mega-schools like Ohio State that educate 50,000-plus students and bring in hundreds of millions in athletics revenue, to the sleepiest of the sleepy Division III schools whose athletics revenue can be measured in the thousands.
Wait, why does the president of Hamline University have any say over what happens in Division I? Because it's the NCAA.
The National Collegiate Athletics Association believes in collegiality, the process of getting as many people groups in a room (or, a Zoom) to hash out decisions that work for everyone and make the playing field as level as it can be. Sure, most stuff is split division by division, but for the big stuff they bring the whole tent together.
So what's being decided tonight? Well, maybe nothing. This same group held a meeting back on July 24 and decided to kick the can down the road to today. It's possible they do the same again tonight. It's also possible they cancel Division II and III championships while leaving Division I alone. In fact, if they decide anything at all, that's the most likely outcome.
But it's also possible, if unlikely, they cancel all fall championships. Remember, this is the same group that axed every winter and spring championship on the same day back on March 12.
What happens if they do cancel all fall championships? Everything, and nothing.
The NCAA is not the NFL, the NBA or MLB. Canceling fall championships doesn't force the Hamline cross country team to end its season any more than it forces Ohio State football to go dark for the fall. Yes, many schools and teams may shut their seasons down as a byproduct of that decision -- indeed, part of the reason most expect the Board to cancel D2 and D3 fall championships is because so many schools have already canceled fall sports.
But there's nothing stopping any school or conference from holding its own regular season and conference championship. The NCAA can take the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow away, but they can't erase the rainbow itself.
That's even more true at the FBS level where, as we all know, the conferences run the postseason system.
So why are so many national college football media outlets talking about this? Because of everyone's favorite word: optics.
If the Board's decision not to stage its fall championships leads to the cancelation of all sports that end in NCAA-run championships, then the only college sport going this fall will be big-time college football.
For many, this will drive home the point that the only reason college football is trying to power through a pandemic is to make money for the schools.
The FBS schools don't want that. They want to play football -- as safely as they can -- and they also want to play volleyball and soccer and cross country.
What happens if the Board does shut down all fall championships? Chaos, potentially.
If the NCAA elects on Aug. 4 to cancel its fall championships -- thereby canceling all NCAA championships in the 2020 calendar year -- a new, Power 5 only organization won't spring out of the dirt on Aug. 5. But it could be the event that eventually leads to one.
Over the weekend, Sports Illustratedpublished a big piece on how today's decision could lead to a breaking point within the NCAA's everyone-in-one-big-tent structure.
“It’s probably the toughest period the NCAA has faced in a long time,” a veteran Power 5 AD told SI in a follow-up piece. “I can’t look at an issue in recent times and say, ‘We got good leadership on that.’ It’s hard not to see significant change coming out of this.”
According to SI, the Power 5 leagues have held discussions about staging their own championships in the fall Olympic sports, similar to how they run the College Football Playoff.
Now, the conventional wisdom as to why this long-fantasized-about breakaway organization hasn't come to fruition usually boil down to three points: 1) the NCAA handles all the logistics of running championship events so the conferences don't have to, 2) March Madness wouldn't be March Madness without the Bucknells and the Florida Gulf Coasts of the world, and 3) the NCAA handles all the boring bureaucratic blah of handling and enforcing the thousand-page rule book.
Well, the NCAA may or may not be preparing to punt on Point 1 for all of 2020 and perhaps beyond, and as for Point 3, much of the monetary and transfer rules are about to go away anyway, meaning there won't be quite as much to legislate moving forward.
So what's the most likely outcome here? Forced to pick an outcome, I'd say the NCAA cancels all fall D2 and D3 championships -- again, the decision has largely been made for them at this point -- while punting on D1 championships until later this month.
But the thing about history is sometimes at an indiscernibly slow speed, and others it unfolds in unmistakable bursts. Could the events of early August 2020 prove to be the latter? We won't know until we know.