How Can Division I Sports Come Back If The Airlines Don’t?

The University of Idaho announced they were going to have on campus, in person classes in Fall 2020. A couple of years ago, they announced they were moving from Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) to Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). A member of the Big Sky Conference, the 16 teams play in states like Arizona, California, Utah, and others.

My first thought when I heard the news was, “Great! Who are they going to play?” It’s easy to get excited about a college deciding (at this point) to open in Fall 2020, but when you really start to think about it, there are more questions than answers.

Bloomberg wrote about discussions inside the airlines about their plans to get back to flying. As conference commissioners, athletic directors and presidents consider the normal challenges for getting teams from point A to point B, add these to your calculations:

• Airline executives are expecting overall flying capacities to be down, and they are moving to smaller sized planes;
• To ease the public’s transition to flying, they plan to leave open the middle seat in rows to create more social distancing;
• To try to recoup lost revenues, and while planes are currently grounded (2/3 of the world’s 26,000 airplanes are currently offline), some airlines will decrease the number of coach seats and increase the number of business or first class seats, hopefully driving more higher paying customers to fly again;
• A survey from the International Air Transport Association “found 40% of recent travelers anticipated waiting at least six months after the virus is contained before flying again”.

“We should be prepared for a choppy, sluggish recovery even after the virus is contained,” Delta Air Lines Inc, Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian said in a letter to employees this week. “I estimate the recovery period could take two to three years.”

If the airlines think it will take two or three years to get back to “normal” (whatever that looks like), what does that mean for schools like the University of Idaho and the Big Sky Conference who want to play this fall? How about other Division I conferences?

Let’s assume for a moment that all members of the conference come to the same conclusion and open their campuses in the fall. Like so many Division I conferences today, members are spread across multiple states and time zones. Sixteen hour bus rides have been avoided for athletes because of the assumption there would be plenty of flights leaving at multiple times, and with consistent connections between cities.

While football may be able to take an air charter (a huge assumption coming out of this pandemic), all other sports that need to travel to compete will face multiple hurdles scheduling flights that will add hours and days to the trip. Missed class days reports normally provided to the faculty senate will inevitably be impacted.

We also have to be cognizant of each individual’s family and personal security with their son or daughter getting on a plane at all. Depending on their personal household circumstances, there may be players that do not want to get on a plane for a team trip.

One other thought-what if your team is traveling, say from Idaho to Arizona, and during the trip, someone in your travel party comes down with COVID_19 symptoms?

As governors begin to make decisions about opening up their individual states, conferences may find that some members are in states that aren’t yet “open” for business. How can conferences manage this complexity in parallel with the financial challenges departments will inevitably face this fall?

Governors have developed “regional alliances” to guide their decisions on getting their states back to work. A regional approach does make sense, both in the tracking of local virus transmissions, and in limiting travel to states that aren’t yet “open”.

Back in 2010-11, college athletics chased after the larger television markets to drive billions in new revenues, thereby creating new conference alignments; the end result led to teams traveling over multiple time zones and logging thousands of miles in the air. It might be time to consider “new” conference realignments for the 2020s, regionally focused and less dependent on the airlines-not just for the immediate health of our athletes, coaches and support staffs, but also for the health of our budgets going forward.