There remain no guarantees here, but these days, every indication points to there being a football season this fall.

It may not look normal, but there's every reason to believe there will be football, and that allows Purdue and every other program like it to expect it and not just hope for it.

At Purdue, football season ticket sales carry on, reaching the total of around 26,000 the athletic department announced Thursday morning, actually slightly ahead of last season's number at this time. That number as it stands today would represent roughly 46 percent of Ross-Ade Stadium's capacity.

Estimates of 25-percent capacity being the cap for the facility this fall are just working estimates, a sliding ceiling that could move up, or down, as conditions dictate. That quarter-capacity starting point, athletic director Mike Bobinski said, was based off social-distancing measures, how people could occupy the stadium if they were six feet apart.

"We needed to pick something to start with, from a planning perspective, just to have a benchmark to base our initial work off," Bobinski said Thursday. "I wanted to start lower rather than higher because it's easier to scale up than to scale down."

The final number won't have to be set until at least August, and even then could quite possibly move from game to game during the season as conditions potentially shift.

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In the meantime, Purdue will keep selling, understanding it could one day have to offer refunds.

"I don't think there's any point in cutting it off right now," Bobinski said, "because we don't know what capacity will be and that might be an unwise decision. What we won't do is sell individual-game tickets, mini-season plans, all the things we'd do in a normal year, until we're certain we'll have capacity to accommodate those."

One of the biggest questions to come with limited-capacity considerations has been an obvious one: Who gets in?

"We've thought long and hard about that and it's not an easy question," Bobinski said. "Without a doubt there will be inconvenience and imposition on some people this year. There's nothing about this year that looks like business as usual, nothing that resembles what we're all used to and we're all comfortable doing. So in whatever system we ultimately devise, someone's going to be unhappy.

"But our position going in is that our two priority groups are our season-ticket holders and our students. Those are the two groups we're going to do everything possible to accommodate to the furthest extent possible."

That may be possible only to a point, though. Bobinski conceded some season-ticket holders could eventually need to reduce their allotments so that more ticket holders' orders can be met.

Additionally, paper tickets will be a thing of the past for this season at least, Bobinski said, but special arrangements might be made for ticket buyers who can't manage e-ticketing. Game programs may meet the same fate.

Game-day alterations and the inevitability of reduced capacity and lost revenue has led to Bobinski projecting a $10-million hit to next year's budget.

As football has begun voluntary on-campus activities this week, no positive COVID-19 tests have come in to this point, Bobinski said. Each player was to be tested before commencing with off-season training.

"As soon as we would have a positive test or someone presenting symptoms," Bobinski said, "they would immediately be isolated, quarantined here in a pre-designated place on campus.

"Anyone they'd been in contact with would then be tested also and until negative tests are returned, they'd be held out of activity, anyone who was in that circle of contact."

Bobinski said that in order to spread out crowds better, Purdue's volleyball team may play in Mackey Arena instead of its usual Holloway Gymnasium.

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