Clemson football is scheduled to kickoff versus Wake Forest on September 12th.
The next 10 days will decide whether or not Clemson football and the ACC, in general, are going to have a college football season.
Why are the next 10 days so important?
Well, because students are back on campuses this week across the ACC and if positive COVID cases see a dramatic rise, you can expect the ACC to take the same route that the Pac-12 and Big Ten did and cancel college football season.
Be clear, no one at this website is rooting for this – it is just the opposite but optics matter to college Presidents and medical health professionals and if you see an abundance of positive clusters popping up with 15,000 to 30,000 students back on campuses across the conference, they will cancel the season.
As we saw back in late June and early July when athletes returned to campuses, there was an increase of positive cases. We should note that no schools released any contextual information such as whether those that tested positive were asymptomatic or actually sick, whether any of them were hospitalized with severe cases or whether any of those that initially tested positive had an immediate follow-up test to confirm the original results or if they were another case of a false positive – which we have seen in athletes like Matthew Stafford or NASCAR driver Jimmy Johnson.
COVID cases already popping up around the ACC
Over the weekend, a UNC website published an article stating that three different COVID-19 clusters had already popped up on campus as students came back. Two of them were on campus in student housing facilities and the third was at a fraternity house off-campus.
Clemson made the decision a month ago to have the first month of the semester would be held virtually and that students could not move back onto campus until September 13th. However, that has not stopped Clemson students living off-campus from coming back over the weekend. If you drove through downtown Clemson over this last weekend as I did, you saw lines out to the doors to bars and plenty of students not wearing masks or socially distancing.
These next 10-14 days are going to decide whether we actually play college football or not in 2020. While there are going to continue to be new positive cases, hopefully, football players across the conference will continue to be smart and limit their exposure outside their bubbles in order to stay on track and play in 2020.