It’s very likely the 2020 college football season could be postponed or canceled. However, if that happens, football will still be played on Saturdays. According to Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, the NFL will likely move games from Sundays to Saturdays if the college football season doesn’t happen. It’s not known how the games will be broadcast, stream or distributed, but consistently having Saturday NFL games is possible.
Florio said the NFL should schedule three Saturday games a week, with a game at 1 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. ET, which is similar to what the league did late last season. There’s another wrinkle Florio mentioned, which is the NFL would need a “one-year dispensation from the broadcast antitrust exemption, which allows the NFL to sell TV rights in a league-wide bundle but prevents the NFL from televising games on Friday or Saturday from Labor Day through early December.”
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This situation is not the first time the NFL has talked about playing games on Saturdays this season. Back in May, Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reported the NFL is looking into having games on both Saturday and Sunday if college football is called off or put on hold. At that time, it was too early to tell since it was the early stages of the pandemic.
“The college game has more uncontrollable variables than the NFL starting with the fact that the players aren’t true professionals,” Marchand wrote. “If students aren’t on campus in the fall, it is hard to see how football players could be asked to compete. Crowd attendance is also more important for the majority of college programs’ bottom lines than it is to the NFL.”
The talk of college football being postponed or canceled for the 2020 season started to heat up when the commissioners of the Power 5 conferences had an emergency meeting on Sunday evening to talk about if they can play during the COVID-19 pandemic. No decision was made at the time, but conferences could likely make a decision sometime this week. If the college football season doesn’t happen this fall, it’s possible the teams will play in the spring. However, with the 2021 NFL season being right around the corner, a number of top players likely wouldn’t take part in spring football as they don’t want to get injured before entering the NFL.
