If college football season is interrupted due to COVID-19, will bowl games be canceled?

The regular season may begin on time, but is bowl season ready?

College football is beginning to resume activities across the nation in June.

The SEC programs will have voluntary offseason activities on campus beginning on June 8 while Clemson, Ohio State and many other programs are getting back at it. Some schools, like Oklahoma, will be getting underway later on July 1, but the overarching theme is teams are preparing for the college football season to begin on time.

What happens after that, remains to be seen, but one of the many considerations being evaluated by college football decision-makers is what will happen to bowl season?

Should the regular season have an interruption because of a second outbreak of the novel coronavirus, that would derail the postseason and dozens of bowl games.

Starting the regular season is most important because you can’t have a postseason or a bowl season without the regular season first. But it’s important to remain cognizant of the possibilities in play and to remain flexible.

This could mean postponing bowl games into the spring if there is a stoppage to the season. It would be a departure from the typical bowl season, but due to the money the bowl games bring in and the revenue it generates for the local sites, it’s hard to imagine every bowl game being canceled.

“If we had to make a move we’d do it,” Liberty Bowl executive director Steve Ehrhart told USA Today. “I can’t speak for other bowls, but just like the conferences, there could be different circumstances in different parts of the country, so in our position just for us, we’d work with our conferences and say what makes the most sense for us as a partnership.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the bowl games are canceled for this season, but the College Football Playoff bowl games and the New Year’s Six bowl games are not going to be canceled if the NCAA and the schools playing in those games and the bowl executives have their say.

The NCAA already had to cancel the NCAA Tournament, they have money in the reserves, but they can’t absorb a cancelation of some of the most prestigious college football bowl games and certainly not the playoff games.

Naturally, the conversation of there being too many bowl games has come up over the last several years and with 44 bowl games, it’s possible there may not be 88 teams who are bowl-eligible.

And what’s interesting about 44 bowl games is whether the fans of the programs will be able to travel to these games and take part in the week-long activities on-site before the actual game takes place and whether they’ll even be able to sit in the stands to cheer on their team.

It’s complicated. The answers arent’ easy and the answers don’t need to be defined today.

What’s important is remaining open-minded and flexible with the intention of getting every bowl game on the schedule played and with full participation.

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