OSU Deputy AD Chad Weiberg on College Football: ‘Difficult to Have a Season if the University is Closed’

We had Oklahoma State deputy athletic director Chad Weiberg on our podcast on Thursday, and I asked him the same question everyone is thinking right now: Is there going to be a college football season?

I’ve become more pessimistic about this in recent days. I now think we won’t have any sports at all until there’s a vaccine (so probably beginning 2021 at the earliest?), which would completely erase a 2020 CFB season.

This is obviously a nightmare scenario (for innumerable reasons), but it’s definitely in play. Weiberg is hopeful, which aligns him with the rest of FBS athletic department leadership.

“At this point I’m still optimistic about it,” he said on Thursday. “I’m an optimistic person to begin with.”

I hope he’s right to be optimistic!

However, what he said next is something I hadn’t really thought about but my colleague Dennis Dodd over at CBS Sports alluded to this week: You can’t have games unless schools are open, which means that things will have to change over the next 100 days to the point that we’re comfortable re-opening places like schools. Is that likely? I … don’t know.

“It’s part of a bigger picture,” said Weiberg. “The real decision in that regard is going to be made obviously at the advice of experts and what’s going on at the time. Then it will come down to university leadership — president Hargis, his leadership team on what’s going on on campus. Are we opening campus back up? Are we having classes? That will be the biggest decision-maker. It’s going to be difficult to have a football season if the university is closed.

“There will be a lot of indicators as we lead up to that. Much like the NBA was an initial domino that fell, I think we’ll have indications from a lot of the professional leagues on what it’s looking like for them. That’ll be an indication of where college football can get started again too. What’s the NBA doing at that point? What’s Major League Baseball doing at that point? What’s the NFL planning to do at that point? I think those will all be leading indicators.”

They certainly will. I’ve been thinking a lot about which sport comes back first. Which organization is the one that’s like, Yeah, we’re in. I don’t know the answer. It’s impossible to get to an answer, and it may remain that way until we get a vaccine for the COVID-19 pandemic.

An unfortunate reality but one that is becoming more and more clear with each passing day.

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