Some schools are not fielding teams. Most schools are not playing 12 games. There will not be anywhere near enough teams reaching six wins to fill all of the eligible bowl spots. The Big Ten, when it released its schedule, allowed all of the schools that are not in the championship game to work out their own scheduling of a 9th opponent that week. They don't need the NCAA's permission to play another game that week as they had still not scheduled 12 games.

With there being so few non-conference games to compare teams from different conferences and not nearly enough eligible teams I expect that the NCAA will allow all of the bowls to either fill their conference contracts or take whoever they want. How else would that work unless they cancel most of the bowls for safety reasons? Then since we might be letting teams with really low win totals into bowls anyway it is easy to imagine the NCAA allowing everyone that does not make a bowl and has not played 12 games to schedule another game in late December. I don't know if that will happen but it would make a lot of sense.

Pac-12 to begin Nov 6 with a seven-game schedule that includes five divisional and two crossover games. One of the crossovers will be played the final weekend of the season. Championship game 12/18. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2020/09/24/pa... /

That leaves the MWC and the MAC as the only two 1A conferences without an announced beginning to the season. The MAC might be first out, last in.

“Hey, we’re going to allow as many fans as Eastern Michigan draws for a Wednesday night game,” said the commissioner.

I watched the Western Kentucky game yesterday and it seemed like more than 20% of the stadium was occupied.

I’d rather see fans allowed but just having Ohio football back is a good start.

The NCAA is considering letting teams be eligible for bowl games regardless of their record. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/29964678... So the conferences will be able to fill all the bowl slots they've contracted for and the "P"s will likely fill any that are "at large" except for the one NY6 slot reserved for a G5 team. I think the Frisco Bowl is the only non-NY6 bowl that has "at large" openings, although there might be others. The B10 has had trouble filling all its slots in the past, but won't have that issue this year; they even have one less slot to fill with the cancellation of the Redbox Bowl vs the Pac-12. The upshot is that the G5 teams will probably fill their contracted bowl games but won't get into others, as they've done in the past. And the indies other than Army and BYU will probably be left out too.

It's 3pm on a Friday afternoon. If they announce good news re football, they've already wasted the news cycle for the day and week. Just incompetent from a comms strategy standpoint.

The announcement made Channel 4's 6 pm newscast in Columbus.

Seriously. The announcement didn't even make the top 10 headlines on ESPN's college football page and garnered 6 posts on the board, which is devoted to MAC football. I don't think winning a news cycle factors into these things.