Niyo: Is college football ready to play follow the leader?

Even putting politics aside, it’s times like these when you find out a lot about your leadership.

Or, as fans of college football fans may soon be reminded, you find out you don’t really have any. Certainly not any centralized leadership as a sport, that is.

As the various stakeholders in college athletics grapple with how to handle their business amid a pandemic – and this is a business, despite what the leaders keep telling the employees – you can already see the fault lines developing. The question is just how much pressure it’ll take for them to crack.

In various interviews over the last 24 hours, we’ve heard the SEC commissioner talking about possibly playing the football season without some of his league’s member schools and the NCAA president admitting it’s not just possible that some conferences will begin practicing while others sit on the sideline later this summer.

“Yeah, I think that’s frankly likely to occur,” NCAA president Mark Emmert told NBC Sports’ Mike Tirico on Thursday.

More: Michigan's Warde Manuel: 'Impossible' to play sports without students on campus

He’s probably right, too, and not just because of the way the coronavirus has affected different regions of the country. Or the way different state and local governments are responding to it.

It’s also because college football is viewed as more than an essential business in some places; it's treated like a constitutional right. I mean, if you think the protests at Michigan’s Capitol building were something this week, just imagine the demonstrations you’d see in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or Clemson, S.C., or Gainesville, Fla., if you told folks there they couldn’t start practicing – or playing games – until Jim Harbaugh was allowed to up in Ann Arbor.

"You say you want a revolution. Well, you know …"

'Different decisions'

Seriously, though, it’s not a problem yet because we’re not there – yet. It’s only the start of May, not Labor Day, when the first college game is scheduled to kick off. A lot can change between now and then. 

But that’s the difficulty here, as Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, explained in an interview with Jacksonville’s WJXL radio on Thursday.

“You’re dealing with a constant hypothetical, and the word ‘if’ is embedded in every question,” Sankey said.

Those questions are being asked on an almost daily basis, as college administrators map out contingency plans while coaches and players anxiously wait for the whistle. Concrete answers aren’t going to come anytime soon, though, if – there's that word again – at all.

“It’s gonna be very unpredictable,” Emmert said. “We’re relying on – as everybody has to – the federal, state and local officials. That means that this could be very different across different parts of the country. You could see some states, even some communities, saying, ‘We’re ready to play, we’re ready to go and bring fans back.’ And other parts of the country saying, ‘No, not yet here.’ And that may be based on really good medical advice.”

Whether it is or isn’t, what’s becoming clear in this country is that there’s no guarantee the advice will be delivered – or heeded – in any uniform fashion. But that’s long been the case for college sports, and that's a hard truth that could be hugely problematic when the time comes, whether it’s in June or July or August. Or even come September at the Big House in Ann Arbor.

“If it’s about the safety of our student-athletes versus filling that stadium," Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said Thursday during a virtual town hall with Edyoucore Sports and Entertainment. "I’d rather it sit empty until we’re in the position to make sure our student-athletes, our coaches and our fans are safe — and their health is primary. We’ll figure it out just like everybody is doing on the financial side. But we can’t play games with peoples’ health and safety.”

Sankey, and others in his position, are saying much the same thing. But the SEC commissioner was asked to weigh in another of those hypothetical questions Thursday, about whether different rules in different states might result in some schools in his conference getting left behind. (Three of the 11 states with SEC schools remain under fairly strict stay-at-home orders right now, including the one that's home to defending national champion LSU.)

“If there’s a couple of programs that aren’t able (to play), does that stop everyone?” he said. “I’m not sure it does.”

And I'm sure it won’t stop some conferences from pushing ahead even if others can’t, or won’t. We already saw that play out in March, when the Ivy League canceled its postseason basketball tournaments while the others attempted to play on, even as pro sports leagues shut down.

“So if that’s a template,” Sankey said, “there is room for different conferences to make different decisions.”

That’s not the plan right now, obviously. It's not what the College Football Playoff Management Committee discussed with Vice President Mike Pence on a conference call a couple weeks ago, either.

“The hope is we’d all move along together,” Sankey said, “and to date that’s been the conversation and collective thinking about how we may have to adjust. That’s most healthy.”

But what’s healthy to some may not be to others in the end, and as Sankey readily admits, “Hope is not a plan.” Nor is there anyone with the power in college sports to insist on it.

More: 'Not appropriate at this time': NCAA recommends tabling one-time transfer waiver

What about the NCAA, you ask? Ha. Good one.

Emmert will eagerly tell you how much money the NCAA lost from the cancellation of March Madness. But while he’s busy pleading with Congress for federal antitrust exemptions, he’s also quick to point out the NCAA really isn’t in charge when it comes to college football.

“The NCAA rules specify when a season can begin and when it can end, and also how many games you’ve got to play to be eligible to play for a championship or a bowl game,” Emmert said. “But when the CFP plays and what that looks like and how that’s formatted, that’s not an NCAA issue. Most people think it is. It’s not. it’s just those 10 conferences.”

And it’s those commissioners who wield the most influence, waving huge wads of cash from television rights at university presidents and telling them what’s what.

Battles on the horizon

Over the years, there has been debate about appointing commissioners for college football and basketball. Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski has advocated for it for the last 25 years or so, as college hoops deals with myriad issues stemming from amateurism and the NBA. It came up again in football over the regional fights sparked by Harbaugh’s satellite camp tour, among other topics.

But get ready for more of that in the coming months.

What if delays force teams to consider a shortened conference-only season? What would that mean for non-Power Five programs that rely on those big September paydays? (They’re reportedly talking about scheduling games among themselves if necessary.) And what about Notre Dame?

More: Michigan, Michigan State national title chances? Less than 1 percent

What if some local governments allow fans to pack stadiums and others insist the stands remain empty? Or perhaps more plausibly, what if a second wave of COVID-19 forces shutdowns in late fall or early winter in northern states? What if the circumstances in Chicago force Northwestern to take a knee, but they're not ready to punt the season in Columbus?

Actually, I think we know the answers. As South Carolina AD Ray Tanner told ESPN last week, “If you're clear in certain parts of the country and others aren't, do you think they're not going to play?"

No, I think the real question is going to be where college football will end up if it's asked to play a game it's not equipped to play: Follow the leader.