The North Dakota State Bison, who have won eight national titles in the last decade in the Football Championship Subdivision, will open their fall season on Saturday in Fargo.
Then, after what could prove to be a showcase for Trey Lance, an N.F.L. prospect at quarterback, the Bison will join almost every other F.C.S. program and not play until at least February. Their next chance at a championship, if a planned spring season happens, will not come before May.
The sweeping resurrection of Football Bowl Subdivision competition — the Power 5 and Group of 5 leagues all plan to play this autumn after some conferences, including the Big Ten and the Pac-12, reversed their approaches to competing during the coronavirus pandemic — is not trickling down to the arm of Division I that draws far less attention and money but attracts millions of fans anyway.
Instead, after the seesawing drama among the wealthier conferences that are tied to the College Football Playoff, the leaders of F.C.S. leagues appear broadly content with their strategy of games being largely off until 2021.
No widespread revolt seems to be brewing, officials across the country said, nor is a sudden, coast-to-coast revival of F.C.S. football in the works. The N.C.A.A.’s decision to move the subdivision’s championship tournament to April and May has helped quell, though not eliminate, open second-guessing, with players, coaches and administrators as assured as they can be that a title will be at stake come spring.
“We are going to learn a lot from the experiences of those teams playing this fall, and we’re going to have a much better, clearer path for how to be successful,” said Patty Viverito, the commissioner of both the Missouri Valley Football Conference, which includes North Dakota State, and the Pioneer Football League. “I think they made the decisions that made the most sense for them at this point, and good for them, but it’s not the same blueprint for us.”
With seven matchups, some of them against F.B.S. teams like Army, Florida State and Wake Forest, this week’s schedule of games will be the biggest burst of F.C.S. football in 2020. But most F.C.S. teams will be nowhere near the playing fields this weekend, their fall seasons upended by the pandemic, in part because of the costs of trying to play safely during a health crisis.
F.C.S. leagues, which had a collective attendance of about 5.7 million people last season, were the first over the summer to cancel plans to play this fall. The Ivy League said on July 8, more than a month before the Big Ten and Pac-12 initially postponed their seasons, that it would not compete this fall. The Patriot League followed less than a week later. The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference announced their plans later in July, part of a run of cancellations into August, when there were just a handful of F.C.S. teams left to play one another and whatever nonconference opponents they could find.
But even as college football’s most famous conferences have started up again, there has been only so much regret to be heard among F.C.S. power brokers. Testing remains prohibitively expensive for many athletic programs and would probably have dealt an unbudgeted six-figure bill to some teams. And league and university officials have watched as even the best-financed programs, powers like Notre Dame, Ohio State and Southern California, have paused workouts or postponed games — evidence, they believe, of the risks of balancing football with the whims and perils of the virus.
“We made the right call based on the information and data we had, and the projections we had for the future,” said Dennis Thomas, the commissioner of the MEAC, whose membership includes Florida A&M and Howard. “It has come to fruition that it was the right call. There are games that are still being canceled, that are still being rearranged each week.”
Although not playing may assuage administrators about testing and budgets, they know that the greatest factor in cultivating peace among players and coaches — and avoiding the Big Ten-style clamor for abrupt policy reversals — was probably the N.C.A.A.’s decision to move the F.C.S. tournament to the spring. Although the governing body of most college sports said that fall games would be “considered” when officials set a winnowed 16-team bracket, many programs believed they would be better positioned to compete if they concentrated on a spring schedule.
“If our playoffs were in December and January, we’d have the same set of pressures to do something different,” said Viverito, the vice chairwoman of the N.C.A.A.’s influential Football Oversight Committee.
Instead, she said, “the minute that the N.C.A.A. decided to move fall championships to the spring, our decision was self-evident: We were going to move our season to where we had the best opportunity to win a national championship.”
Still, there have been bubbling signs of dissent and disappointment, particularly among players, as they watched other schools gear up to play.
A troubling part for Michael Gerace, an offensive lineman for Maine, is that the team could be playing right now. “But at the end of the day,” he said last month, according to The Bangor Daily News, “the administration is making decisions in order to keep us safe.”
Some F.C.S. schools have chosen to play this fall, oftentimes against nonconference opponents. In the Southland Conference, which is based in Texas, four members — Abilene Christian, Central Arkansas, Houston Baptist and Stephen F. Austin — opted out of the league’s plan to compete in the spring and instead chose to play exclusively this fall. So far, as seven of their conference counterparts wait for 2021, their collective record stands at 2-8.
“Our league landed in a position that just kind of fits the times: It’s different, it’s odd, it’s unprecedented, it’s unlikely ever to happen again, but it’s 2020,” said Tom Burnett, the Southland commissioner.
“I want everyone to be correct in the decision they made,” he added. “I want them to sleep at night because they’ve done the best thing for their programs.”
So it has gone throughout the F.C.S., with colleges looking to balance their immediate ambitions with the potential for a safer, surer route through the spring.
It did not take long for North Dakota State, the powerhouse of the F.C.S. circuit in recent years, to conclude that it would be challenging to fill a schedule with nonconference games. In a statement in August announcing Saturday’s matchup with Central Arkansas at the Fargodome, Matt Larsen, North Dakota State’s athletic director, said officials there “felt it was in the best interest of our football program to practice and play one game this fall.”
On Monday, Matt Entz, the Bison coach, said “the pros heavily outweighed the cons of not playing this fall.”
The team, he suggested, needed just one game to aid some of its aims.
“When the conference season was canceled, the No. 1 priority for our seniors was to make sure that there was continued development for our young kids,” he said. “And our young kids, in turn, said their No. 1 priority was to make sure our seniors had one last shot to go out because they had earned it.”
Plenty of F.C.S. officials will be keeping watch, assessing whether the Bison might have another title run in store.
Pandemic or not, they suggested, it is not too early to start scouting for spring.
October 02, 2020 at 03:56AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/sports/ncaafootball/college-football-fcs.html
Few Games, but Very Little FOMO, in College Football’s Less Glamorous Tier - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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