Theoretical:

What if Ohio State is unable to open their campus by the start of football season, but Penn State can? Should the Nittany Lions start the season with the Michigan teams and everybody else, while the Buckeyes chill out instead?

Head ball coach James Franklin touched on the idea during a Wednesday Zoom call, via ESPN:

“I can’t imagine that right now we’re all going to open at the same time,” he told ESPN. “If the SEC, for example, opens up a month earlier than the Big Ten, and the Big Ten is able to open up and 12 of the 14 schools, if two schools can’t open, I don’t see a conference — any conference — penalizing 80% or 75% of the schools because 25% of them can’t open.”

“To me, unless there’s a level playing field and the NCAA comes out and says that no one’s opening before this date to try to help with that, what you really end up doing is you end up hurting the conference. Say two or three of the schools in our conference that are ranked in the top 10 have the ability to open and a couple schools don’t, and you make the decision to hold the entire conference back, you’re hurting the conference as a whole in terms of your ability to compete.”

It’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t mind Ohio State taking a year off, since those bastards are always good. Oklahoma can also sit this one out. Let’s switch it up a bit, get some new conference winners in there.

But yeah, theoretically you’d be looking at some schools opening and others remaining closed, depending on their respective COVID-19 situations. Do we play a shorter conference schedule with the available schools, or just shut down the entire season? Is that even fair?

A question for the philosophers.