College football season already sees reductions hit
SHEPHERDSTOWN — The axe has already fallen.
Scheduled football games have been lopped off of the coming 2020 season.
And West Virginia is one of the schools where games will not be played.
When the Big 10 Conference mandated that all non-conference football games were dismissed from schedules, it meant that the Mountaineers won’t be meeting Maryland in Morgantown on Sept. 19, as originally planned. That notice brought the WVU schedule back to 11 games, and at least one more game might be gone if the Atlantic Coast Conference follows the lead of the Big 10.
The Mountaineers have the ACC’s Florida State scheduled in the season-opener in Atlanta on Sept. 5.
If the West Virginia vs. Florida State game is eventually canceled, then the Mountaineers will have only Eastern Kentucky in Morgantown as a remaining non-conference game.
The nine Big 12 games already on WVU’s schedule have not been touched.
Without any non-conference games, Maryland is left with only nine Big 10 matches. The Terrapins have five games within the far-flung league slated to be held in College Park.
Will the NCAA do anything to change the provision that a school must win six games to be bowl-eligible? If it doesn’t lower the bowl-eligible number of wins, then a courtroom full of lawsuits will sprout from all over the land.
In response to the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus, the eight Ivy League schools have canceled all their football games. Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. will keep football, but completely eliminate 11 other sports.
It would seem likely other changes are just over the disease-tainted horizon.
In the high school ranks in West Virginia, what was the scheduled first week of football games has been eliminated. With last week’s ruling presided over by Gov. Jim Justice and WVSSAC leader Bernie Dolan, no football games will be played in August. As of now, the first week of games can be played from Sept. 3-5. Also as of right now, public schools in West Virginia are scheduled to open on Sept. 8.
Any Mountain State high school football team scheduled to play a school from out of state may have that game cancelled because of edicts issued in surrounding states or by Justice or Dolan in the future.
The axe is sharp. It could easily drop on the schedules of WVU, Marshall, Shepherd or in the murky high school ranks.