When the COVID-19 pandemic started raging just about a year ago, uncertainty reigned supreme. What would life look like as the country navigated ever-changing circumstances? How would the spread of a new virus affect intercollegiate athletics?
While Saint Francis' football program was forced to adjust to changes occurring seemingly every day – including the NAIA's decision to move the national tournament from fall to spring – those changes have invigorated coach Kevin Donley, now in his 42nd, and admittedly strangest, season as a college football head coach.
“There's not a better time to be a coach than right now,” Donley said. “It's a thing that you have to do when you're in a leadership role. Your job is to teach kids how to deal with adversity. You have to show the kids how to deal with COVID.”
That teaching will be on display at noon Saturday in the season opener against Taylor. To ensure proper social distancing, Saint Francis will limit attendance to about 1,500 fans, with players' families seated in separate sections from fans of both teams. As of Wednesday afternoon, USF athletic director McCaffrey said that only about 150 tickets remained available.
The Cougars did ultimately lose a few athletes that chose to complete their academic careers and graduate rather than wait until the spring to play one final season at Bishop D'Arcy Stadium. While every program around the NAIA felt those losses to some extent, in the case of USF, playing a fall schedule simply wasn't an option.
Four foes on Saint Francis' schedule – Madonna, Concordia, Lawrence Tech and Siena Heights – call Michigan home. That state suspended all football activities until the spring. USF was forced to cancel Saturday's originally scheduled season opener against Madonna after random COVID tests, required by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, turned up multiple positive results within Madonna's football program.
With nearly half of the league in Illinois, which also shuttered football, trying to cobble together a schedule last fall would have proved an impossible task.
“We didn't have a choice, we didn't have anyone to play, so the decision was made for us,” McCaffrey said. “Once they said (schools in those states) couldn't play, we were all unified. As soon as that happened, our mindset shifted.”
Out of that negative situation arose a positive one. That mindset shift – for Donley, McCaffrey and the USF football program – meant flipping the calendar, holding spring practices in the fall and the fall schedule in the spring. That experience for incoming freshmen, getting several weeks of practice prior to the spring schedule rather than just preseason followed immediately by games in the fall, more than overcomes the roster losses.
“Essentially, spring moved to the fall,” Donley said. “We lost some kids to graduation, but we had some freshmen that got some spring practice. We're going to be a young team, but we had some kids get some time and I think we'll be ready.”
While the MSFA opted to move its season to the spring, not all conferences within the NAIA followed suit, despite the national tournament slated to start April 17. The four-round tournament will see its first three rounds played on campus at the higher seeds, with the national championship game scheduled for May 10 at Eddie G. Robinson Stadium in Grambling, Louisiana.
The move to the spring also ensures that if USF qualifies for the postseason, either by winning the Mideast Division championship or by earning one of four at-large berths, the Cougars will enter the tournament with games six straight weeks.
While Morningside stands as the nation's top-ranked team in the first NAIA FirstDown PlayBook Top 25 poll, the Mustangs played their eight-game schedule in the fall, last playing on Nov. 21. Morningside earned qualification to the national tournament as the Great Plains Athletic Conference champion, but will face a nearly five-month layoff from its last game to when the opening round kicks off.
Baker and Grand View out of the Heart of America Athletic Conference both finished 6-0 in the fall and face similar layoffs to Morningside.
“Coach (Donley) and I were talking about that last week,” McCaffrey said. “That was another reason when we decided, once the NAIA moved the championship to the spring, it was a no-brainer. It's definitely a pro that we've been doing our thing and we'll have competition the next (six) weeks and go right into the postseason, whereas other teams could be a little rusty.”
The spring schedule does potentially present one other problem, though it likely won't manifest until the fall. Spring practice traditionally affords Donley the chance to work with his players in limited contact as they refresh from the rigors of a 10-game fall schedule.
The players will enter the spring schedule possibly more rested than at any other point in their careers, having not played since the fall of 2019, be it in high school, in the case of the freshmen on the roster, or in college. But the potential to play as many as 10 games this spring, with significantly less time to fully recover from the physical toll of a season, could raise injury issues in the fall.
With COVID forcing everyone into new and unnatural situations, however, the opportunity to play in the face of a yearlong global pandemic more than outweighs those potential pitfalls.
“I think the good news is we have flexibility,” McCaffrey said. “We played 14 games two years in a row and still came back and played the following year. We'll back off in the summer, but they're young, they're hungry and they're resilient, and we have some of the best staff in the country.
“The only con is that our seniors aren't going to get a full season. Our seniors signed up for a 10-game season and a shot at a national championship. I think everything else we've handled.”
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