What about football season?
No one knows what the future holds right now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has affected virtually everything.
When life as we know it can resume, no one knows for certain, and that can raise many uncomfortable what-ifs.
On Sept. 5 — less than 170 days from today — Purdue is due to open its 2020 season at Nebraska. A good month of preseason practice would traditionally occur beforehand after a full winter, spring and summer of strength work and conditioning, plus spring ball.
Spring ball was just cut short and Purdue's athletic facilities locked down through early April.
What if this moratorium on everything continues deep into the summer? How much lead-in time would be necessary to have a season?
"That is a great question and one that lots of people are thinking about," Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski said. "You do clearly want to make sure that you can, for any season, football or any other fall season, that you do it in a way that protects the health of your athletes. You have to have an ability to be reasonably conditioned, and then ramp up in a way that makes sense."
Coaches from other conferences who've spoken publicly to date have openly wondered about the prospect of playing a modified schedule, if need be. That is, provided things return to a place where it's deemed safe and socially responsible to pack tens of thousands of people into stadium seating.
Virginia coach Bronco Mendenhall told CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd and other reporters that his program is moving forward as if the season will be affected in some way.
"Knowing that fall camp timing might even be pushed back," Mendenhall said, "meaning that there certainly could be a chance that it's not even be a full schedule played this year — if football is played, period."
That is something of a worst-case scenario, though.
If normalcy returns as hoped this spring, however, the season should be safe, but not without modification to its run-up.
In the Big Ten, the conference's athletic directors are conducting daily conference calls, Bobinski said, to pore over such topics, among many others.
"Best-case scenario, things get resolved or we manage through this as a nation and otherwise in a way that allows activity at some level to resume in the summertime, I would not at all be surprised to see an ability to hold some sort of a spring practice opportunity maybe in June or July, in advance of the regular fall camp to allow you to provide some build-up into fall practice in advance of a football season.
"I think that's just realistic and smart and it will be necessary to protect everybody's health. So, that is far from policy or even discussion at this point in time because it's so uncertain. ... (The athletic directors) talk about lots of these things as to what the eventualities might be. And that's one that I think we all feel like, just to be smart and safe here, you would have to provide some opportunity for an extension of your typical fall practice period, just to account for the fact that you've been out of business for some period of time, which could be months."
This will be unprecedented, as so many other angles of this are.
There's no way around the traditional college football off-season being totally compromised. Organized strength training and summer conditioning programs likely can't exist in their normal sense, or at least not without being cut well short. Let's say hypothetically that normalcy of some kind returns in May; that's still two months cut out. Two crucial months.
Many schools — most schools — likely won't have the majority of their players on campus even.
The concern here is health of a different kind: Injury.
"Conditioning and fitness and all of that will be compromised because even though you try to do things remotely, and we're all going to provide our folks with workout plans that maybe they can execute or maybe they can't given their circumstance or being away from our campus. They're certainly not going to be what they would have been, and you've got to be realistic about that and find ways to adjust to that."
As for the day-to-day operations of promoting and selling a football season, at Purdue, the beat will go on, as virtually nothing else does. Recruiting continues, and in time, Purdue will resume selling tickets and marketing itself In advance of an important season.
"We're going to continue to operate under the presumption that we're playing football and basketball," Bobinski said. "And I do believe that one of the unique things about sport, college sport and otherwise, as we as a society get through this, I think sport will be something that people will be thirsting for. Just to return to that sort of sense of escape and enjoyment and being around positive competitive environments. I'd like to think that it'll be of great interest to people when things clear here and again, hopefully in time for a fall season. So we are continuing at this point in time, operating under the presumption that we'll be back at it in time for that to happen."
Membership Info: Sign up for GoldandBlack.com now | Why join? | Questions?
Follow GoldandBlack.com: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
More: Gold and Black Illustrated/Gold and Black Express | Subscribe to our podcast
Copyright, Boilers, Inc. 2020. All Rights Reserved. Reproducing or using editorial or graphical content, in whole or in part, without permission, is strictly prohibited.