NFL & College Football 2020 Season Status: Start Dates, Latest Updates

August 20, 2020 - by Jason Lisk

Now that we’re into August 2020 and football season is drawing near, we will use this post to provide updates on the important recent news about the status of the 2020-21 NFL and college football seasons.

Since the coronavirus pandemic caused widespread suspensions of U.S. sports in March, we now have seen European soccer leagues, the MLS, the NBA, MLB, NHL, golf and other sports successfully return to action in some form.

As of now, both the NFL and college football are on track to play this fall. However, some college football teams and conferences have canceled their traditional fall seasons, and some of them are exploring delayed winter or spring 2021 campaigns instead.

2020 NFL Season Updates

Latest Status

The 2020 NFL season is moving forward as originally scheduled. NFL Week 1 kicks off on Thursday, September 10th with the Chiefs hosting the Texans.

The NFL has canceled all preseason games in 2020, in order to allow more time for teams to conduct virus testing and get acclimated to the “new normal” precautionary procedures implemented in training camps. The start of on-field drills wad also pushed back to allow for an appropriate quarantine period for players reporting to camps.

Promising Testing Results (August 12)

The NFL announced that 0.46% of all test results had come back positive in an initial batch of over 100,000 coronavirus tests of players, coaches, and staff. At the initial intake of training camps, when players and staff were reporting in from the community at large, the positive rate was 1.7%. That figure implies that the positive testing rate has been below 0.4% once players had reported to camp and began quarantine.

While the NFL hasn’t gone with a full “bubble” scenario, like the NBA and MLS did by having all teams play in Orlando, there does now seem to be evidence that athletes restricting their movements among the general public has reduced positive test rates. After several initial positive cases from NBA players when first reporting to the bubble, no NBA players have tested positive yet within the bubble for five straight weeks.

The NFL has now begun full team drills, so we will see if testing rates continue on the same downward trend, or at least stay this low. If they do, the season should be on track to start as scheduled.

We also did some of our own analysis of the likelihood of players missing games. Our conclusion was that the individual risk of players testing positive appears to be low, based on projected infection rates in the United States and teams presumably taking more precautions than the general public. At the time of our study, we said:

If the overall situation in the NFL is stable enough that games are being played, players designated as out due to coronavirus ought to make up a small percentage of total absences. Of course, the NFL has stated that anyone that has “close contact” with a person who had a positive test must have two negative tests before participating. This could seemingly apply to a lot of players on a team in the immediate aftermath of one testing positive. However, our assumption here is that if large swaths of a team are ruled out from participating for a few days because of the close contact rule, the game would more likely be delayed or postponed.

Player Opt-Outs (August 6)

NFL players had the option to opt out of the 2020-21 NFL season by an August 6th deadline. Ultimately, less than 4% of all NFL players ended up opting out of this season.

You can read some fantasy football related analysis we did on the most impactful NFL player opt-outs in 2020.

Contingency Plans

In our early reaction to the 2020 schedule release, we noted that the NFL had built in some contingencies to play games in 2020 even if there ended up being delays in starting the season. Among those contingencies:

• All Week 2 matchups involve teams that share a bye week, so if necessary, those games could be distributed later in the year if the season is pushed back.
• Weeks 3 and 4 all feature non-division matchups, and those two weeks could be eliminated if necessary while preserving other parts of the schedule.
• The playoffs and Super Bowl can be pushed back up to a month to facilitate any moves in the schedule.

2020 College Football Season Updates

Latest Status

Current plans call for a reduced-scope 2020 fall college football season, with not all conferences playing. Unlike the NFL, which has centralized decision-making, the college football Power Five conferences are divided in their respective assessments of the risk of a playing a fall season.

As of August 20, the majority of top college teams (including the entire SEC) plan on playing revised schedules in the fall, with some conferences moving to conference-only scheduling to limit travel and increase flexibility in the case of any future game postponements.

Other teams and conferences (including the Big Ten and Pac-12) have officially canceled games for the fall, and are potentially hoping to play games in the winter and/or spring.

One immediate effect of schedule changes that have already been announced is that the opening day for the college football FBS season has been pushed back to Thursday, September 3rd.

Who’s Playing In The Fall?

Here are the conferences who have announced they are still playing football in the fall of 2020:

• SEC
• Big 12
• ACC (with Notre Dame playing with the conference)
• American
• Conference USA (minus Old Dominion)
• Sun Belt

In addition, independents Army, BYU, Liberty are playing, while Air Force is playing its two Commander-In-Chief rivalry games against Army and Navy despite the Mountain West canceling the fall season.

In total, 77 of the 130 FCS programs are currently playing football in the fall of 2020.

The SEC is playing a conference-only 10-game schedule this fall, with games now beginning on September 26th. The ACC and Big 12 are each playing just one non-conference opponent this year, with games for both conferences scheduled to begin September 12th.

Who’s Not Playing in the Fall?

The following conferences and teams have officially announced that they are canceling their fall football season, with the possibility of playing in the winter or spring.

• Big Ten
• Pac-12
• Mid-American Conference
• Mountain West
• Independents: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Mexico State
• Old Dominion of Conference USA

Meanwhile, there are reports that some teams in the Big Ten are trying to somehow salvage some fall games. One such report has Ohio State leading an effort to get five other Big Ten programs to play a round-robin home-away schedule.

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