The Indiana football team is still hoping to play football in 2020, but on a tense Monday, it appeared they weren’t going to and still don’t know if they will.
The Hoosiers took a day off yesterday as it appeared the Big Ten was about to cancel the season. But Tom Allen said it was a planned day off and had nothing to do with the possibility of the season being called.
A Monday that was just supposed to be some time off for the football team, turned into a day where everybody just sat and waited for an announcement that never came. News started to trickle out yesterday morning that the Big Ten presidents had voted 12-2 to cancel all fall sports. The two schools that voted to keep sports were Nebraska and Iowa.
Different media outlets reported that the Big Ten had canceled and the IndyStar even wrote about it. But as the day went on, there was complete radio silence from the actual Big Ten. No announcement of the fall getting canceled or of a vote.
Questions started to arise if there was even a vote or was the Big Ten now trying to backtrack after the backlash they were getting. Players kept tweeting out #wewanttoplay and Whop Philyor from Indiana was one of them.
There were rumors that the PAC-12 was following suit but nothing was heard from them either. The SEC, ACC, and Big 12 seemed steadfast in not making a decision yet and that left the Big Ten out on an island. Would they be the first domino to fall for the Power 5 or would they be the ones viewed as weak?
It is a no-win situation with the current situation in the US right now and one none of us would actually want to be in. Do they play and risk players getting sick or do they cancel and lose millions of dollars and rob the players the chance to play? It is a tough decision and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
So players and fans sat around hoping that the news wasn’t true. Hoping that there was still a chance the season could be saved, but not knowing what was happening next.
They sat and scrolled through Twitter or whatever social media they were using seeing if there were any updates. But there would be no updates just a bunch of “from a source” news, that turned out to not be true, at least for right now.
The news now is that the Big Ten presidents haven’t officially met and pushing back the season or moving it to spring are on the table. They are supposed to be meeting soon and hopefully, we will know.
But on a seemingly normal Monday, the time seemed to stand still as we waited and hoped we wouldn’t hear the dreadful news that the Big Ten was done with fall sports. For one more day we get to keep that hope. Tuesday might bring another story, but hopefully, we don’t have to sit and wait as we did on Monday.
It was not a fun day to be a college football fan, or for that matter a Big Ten fan. Here is to hoping the rest of the week is much better.