College football teams will have a six-week preseason leading up to the 2020 season, which will start as scheduled, under a plan approved Wednesday by the NCAA Division I Council.
The outline, proposed last week by the Football Oversight Committee, extends the preseason two weeks longer than normal.
A four-tier schedule is now in place for college football’s return amid the coronavirus pandemic:
–June 1-25, voluntary workouts
–Beginning July 13, team weight training and conditioning workouts
–Beginning July 24, walkthroughs and team meetings
–Beginning Aug. 7, practice
“This is the culmination of a significant amount of collaboration in our effort to find the best solution for Division I football institutions,” Shane Lyons, chair of the committee and athletic director at West Virginia, said in a statement. “Our student-athletes, conference commissioners, coaches and health and safety professionals helped mold the model we are proposing.”
American Football Coaches Association executive director Todd Berry told ESPN regarding the extended preseason, “It’s really just more of an opportunity from an evaluation standpoint in terms of their conditioning, so we have this ramp-up going into preseason. And then secondarily, student-athletes and coaches are anxious to start talking some football, and we thought even from a psychological standpoint it would be very beneficial.
“The walkthroughs give an opportunity not to just get a visual but actually participate.”
Six Division I FBS games are scheduled for “Week 0” on Aug. 29: Hawaii at Arizona, New Mexico State at UCLA, Cal at UNLV, Marshall at East Carolina, Idaho State at New Mexico and UC Davis at Nevada. A full slate is scheduled for Week 1, Sept. 3-7.
Schools playing on Aug. 29 will move up their timetables by one week from the general guidelines. Players may be in athletic activities for 20 hours per week.
The normal limit of 110 athletes in the preseason will be waived this year, Lyons told ESPN.
“Let’s say you have 120 working out, and then all of a sudden you have to send 10 kids home for two weeks, and then they come back, you have testing issues and a bunch of other things,” Lyons said. “This is the year you want to keep them in this kind of a bubble as opposed to sending them back out into their own communities. …
“You may need those numbers to conduct practices, so that was part of the discussion as well, having the flexibility this year in case you do have some student-athletes who test positive who are out.”