Texas Football: Big 12 staying patient compared to Big Ten, ACC

As the Big 12 and SEC continue to stay patient with their approach to the 2020 season, the Texas football program is going to have to wait patiently too.

The start of the 2020 college football season is very much up in the air. But the Texas football program sits in one of the two Power Five conferences in the country that has yet to officially move to a conference only schedule. Earlier in the week, the Big Ten was the first to announce that it would move to a conference-only schedule this year. The ACC and PAC-12 soon followed suit with that same move.

But the Big 12 and SEC remain as the lone Power Five conferences that have not made the move to cancel the non-conference schedules. Granted any non-conference game that a team from the Big 12 or SEC had against the three Power Five conferences that cancelled that part of their schedule is gone too.

The non-conference schedule for the Longhorns this year consists of the South Florida Bulls (American Athletic Conference), LSU Tigers (SEC), and UTEP Miners (Conference-USA). While there’s no concrete adjustment to the non-conference schedules of the AAC, SEC, or C-USA, as it relates to the Longhorns, that is subject to change given how fast other things are shifting right now.

Randy Peterson of the Des Moines Register posted an interesting tweet earlier in the week that sparked thought as to where the Big 12 officials are at right now. Apparently Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby isn’t ready to make any concrete adjustments to the 2020 football season as of yet.

Yet, the writing is on the wall that the college football season is always subject to change in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The JUCO football season is already being moved to the spring. And the Ivy League cancelled out all fall sports for the 2020 academic semester.

Bowlsby is definitely taking a more patient approach, with no guarantees that there will be no adjustments to the 2020 season. There’s no way that it can go on at this point without any level of adjustment. The likes of the Cy-Hawk rivalry game between the Iowa State Cyclones and Iowa Hawkeyes getting cancelled out for 2020 is already one massive domino to fall.

As it pertains to the Longhorns, all eyes will be falling on how the non-conference game against LSU is handled. At least the two programs are in bordering states, which would make the travel theoretically easier than a non-conference game like that of the Oregon Ducks vs. Ohio State Buckeyes.

This is an ongoing storyline that might change week-by-week until late August. The Big 12 and SEC are waiting to officially make their moves, but the pandemic is altering the outlook of the looming season each passing day.

Texas is supposed to open up the 2020 season on Sep.5 against USF at home. That monumental showdown against the defending National Champion LSU is set for Week 2, on Sep. 12 on the road in Baton Rouge.