Ithaca Plants Their Reopening Flag (and the Elephant in the Room)

The questions surrounding the 2020 D3FB season continue to swirl about and unfortunately there are no concrete answers. Ultimately the Statesmen Football coaching staff are likely not going to worry about things out of their control, and will remain focused on preparation for the upcoming season, especially once they receive direction from the NCAA and the HWS administration.

Conference rival and nearby Ithaca College announced today that they plan to reopen on Monday, October 5 for in-person, on campus classes. While I do believe this to be very premature by the IC administration, I also wouldn't be surprised if more colleges, HWS included, follow suit. HWS has formed it's own "reopening committee" and will likely take factors such as Ithaca's approach into consideration. 

Regardless, the NCAA will be making key decisions in the next 6-8 weeks, starting with the Board of Governors and D1 providing guidance in the next few weeks. From what we can gather, the confidence in there being a D3FB season is high, but the powers that be feel it's too early to make any final decisions. There are a multitude of variables at play, ranging from what the wide variety of school and conference decisions will be, different parts of the country being on different reopening time tables and criteria, are fans (and how many would be) allowed, etc. among many other scenarios.

So before the end of June, if not sooner, the NCAA is going to have to decide if they'll mandate a shorter or modified season (e.g., starting in October, with preseason practice in September) in D3; and/or if they'll just determine what playoff criteria will look like and when they'd aim to start the playoffs (e.g., if the regular season goes into December with the playoffs and Stagg Bowl occurring after and into January or a shortened / modified season would require updated playoff selection criteria - the latter is the more interesting scenario to me based on the question how would the Committee look at a conference champion that's played 7-9 games vs. ones that only play 5 or 6?).

Anyway, for the short term, all we can do is speculate. Hopefully we'll have some information on the remaining commits to the Class of 2024 (I captured about 14-15 of them so far this off-season) in the near future.

Thanks as always for reading and go 'Bart!