Reports: No official decision on fate of Big Ten college football season

August 11, 2020
|In Badgers
|By Zach Heilprin

A rollercoaster of a day ended with the Big Ten reportedly not making a decision on whether to move forward with its 2020 football season.

According to ESPN, presidents of the 14 schools that make up the conference are slated to meet Tuesday morning to discuss their options. Among them is pushing back the start, something that would make sense with the revised conference schedule released last week. Right now, games are slated to begin the week of Sept. 5, but the new schedule allowed for the year to start as late as Sept. 26 and still get all 10 games in.

The possibility the season could still happen seemed unlikely after ESPN reported Monday morning that the Big Ten, along with other Power 5 conferences, we having discussions about canceling the season. A little later, Dan Patrick told listeners of the Dan Patrick Show that the Big Ten would announce Tuesday it was canceling its season, adding that in a vote among conference presidents, it was 12-2 in favor of not playing football this fall. Other outlets, including the Detroit Free Press and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, confirmed the report of the season being canceled.

However, the conference pushed back on that news later in the day.

What followed was a deluge of college coaches and players taking to social media to plead with administrators not to cancel the season. The hashtag #WeWantToPlay became one of the top trending topics on Twitter in the early afternoon hours. Though Wisconsin’s official football account and head coach Paul Chryst stayed silent, many players did not.

A UW official said the Badgers were on the field Monday morning as scheduled for the start of fall camp.