Michigan Football: Discussing shortened seasons, schedules and more

ADs weigh in

Brett McMurphy from The Stadium conducted an extensive poll of FBS athletic directors regarding their thoughts on the 2020 season and they are not very confident in the possibility of a season. According to the survey that’s based on a confidence level of 1-10, 18% of those polled stated they’re a 5.

What the unnamed athletic directors said about the possibility of a cancellation didn’t bode well for the future of college athletics.

“There better be (a season) or many programs will be out of business,” an athletic director said.

Another said “it would be devastating,” and yet another used an expletive to describe the impact.

Michigan’s own AD, Warde Manuel, spoke about the potential of play in his interview on the In the Trenches podcast with Jon Jansen.

“If we do come back to play in the fall, would we play in front of a crowd?,” Manuel stated. “Will crowd sizes be mandated to be smaller? Will our fanbase decide that they don’t want to be in large crowds because of this year? There’s many factors — ranging from will we play to playing without fans, and anything in between.”

At this point, Warde is dealing with the issues at hand and hasn’t had time to take a peek into the future, but that time is coming and faster than he would like to admit.

“We haven’t modeled all of that at this point in time,” Manuel said. “We’re sort of dealing with the end of the academic year. We’re dealing with making sure that our student-athletes and our students on campus finish everything, and the health and safety of our staff and our student-athletes, coaches, the fans. But at some point, we’re going to be turning our eye towards the future and modeling the potential impacts (on the budget) that this could have.”