How can college football adapt to increasingly extreme weather?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Quick housekeeping note: I am flying out to Salt Lake on Wednesday morning and will traveling between Ogden and Provo for various Serious Professional Journalism things, such as Notre Dame-BYU, until Sunday morning. If you’re in town and would like me to swing by to say hello, drop me a note!

We’ve got a really busy week ahead, between traveling, software updates and covering the actual news. So today, I’m turning the time over to my pal, Matt Stahl, who just wrote a very interesting story over at Al.com about something I’ve been curious about for a long time but have never reported out: As weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable — from 95-plus-degree heat extending well into October to hurricanes and tropical storms — how can college football adapt?

Let’s hear from Matt.

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Hi everyone, glad to contribute something to my favorite college sports newsletter after a six-year hiatus. Matt has graciously let me hijack the platform today to promote something I’ve been reporting for the past few months in between keeping up with the day-to-day madness of the Alabama beat.

Last week, I released a project at AL.com on how rising heat is impacting college football, especially fans attending games, and what can be done to solve the problems. I intentionally didn’t use the term “climate change” in the piece, because, candidly, I think it would’ve caused a fair amount of the site’s audience to tune out and ignore an important story, but since we’re among friends, I’ll tell you: Climate change is what it’s really about. Spoonful of sugar, etc. 

Anyway, I did not come away from the reporting especially optimistic about solutions. I think it’s likely that more and more fans keep suffering medical issues in perpetuity, even as some schools do all they can to keep people cool. 

But rather than wallowing in existential pessimism, I wanted to share a few things I learned from reporting the project, along with some areas where I’d like to dig more.

The immediate response to my story was the most obvious solution of all: Just play the damn games at night. 

And that’s correct. I think it’s the overwhelmingly easy answer that would keep fans safe for the most part, with the least disruption to schedules.

But that’s not how ESPN fills its windows with inventory. Mike Aresco, the former (longtime) commissioner of the artist currently known as the American Conference, told me he’d tried to keep schools like Tulane, Houston and South Florida out of early windows when it was unbearably hot, but it wasn’t that simple.

“You had limited leverage,” Aresco said. “Because if you didn’t play those games, you hardly have a TV deal.”

Josh Looney, the athletic director at FCS North Alabama, told me his school largely gets to pick its kickoff time because its TV deal in the United Athletic Conference isn’t on linear television. That’s nice, but UNA also makes orders of magnitude less money than even the poorest power league schools.

Like it or not (I don’t), TV money pays the bills. Schools aren’t giving it up because fans are too hot in the bleachers.

Entering the project, I thought the real answer for schools that have to play in daytime TV windows was just to move inside. A few calls dispelled me of that notion.

Scott Ramsey, president of the Nashville Sports Council and the Music City Bowl, pointed out that the NFL schedule makes things tricky, even more than schools’ unwillingness to move conference games off campus. College games are moved inside NFL stadiums over Labor Day weekend for a reason: Preseason ends the week before, and the regular season begins the week after.

“For a building like ours, you’re going to have to wait until the NFL schedule comes out and then schedule the game,” Ramsey said. “And then you’ve only got two or three months, and most teams already have their schedules together by then.”

I’d also imagined schools could play doubleheaders in NFL stadiums for the first few weeks of the season. But Ramsey corrected me there, too, pointing out that the sheer number of players loading and unloading from locker rooms would make it nearly impossible to play the early and afternoon windows back-to-back in the same building. 

Along the reporting journey, I spoke with Shel Winkley, meteorologist for Climate Central and also Texas A&M’s in-stadium weatherman. He was immensely helpful, and he also sent me to UConn professor Douglas Casa, the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute. Casa has a particularly interesting idea: moving high school football to spring.

When I talked to him, he was adamant that not only was spring high school football the best way forward, it also might be the only way for many schools. Liability from athlete heatstroke deaths in practice, Casa said, might make it so moving football to a cooler time of year is the only wise financial move.

It’d be a radical change, but I think it’s an idea worth exploring. It’s certainly not without complications, though.

For instance, I don’t think every state would change to a spring schedule at once, so it’d be interesting to game out how different states playing in different seasons would impact recruiting. And that’s not the only problem. Would moving seasons create conflicts with other spring sports using football fields? Would we be asking players to not only quit basketball and baseball, but also play two football seasons in the same year during the transition period? Alternatively, would some schools end up going 15 months without a football season, and would that impact players’ recruitment?

Still, though, I can’t help but think that everything would look a bit better if football were played in spring. As a mediocre high school tight end in Tennessee, I certainly would have been happier running camp gassers in Not July. 

Heat isn’t the only issue climate change is creating. Natural disasters are getting stronger and more frequent, and I can’t help but think they could eventually impact college football in a major way. Back in 2011, a tornado came extremely close to Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa.

What would happen if a future storm actually took out a stadium? Hell, what if some sort of super hurricane took out multiple SEC football stadiums in the middle of a season?

Schools certainly carry insurance on their stadiums, so they would probably rebuild. But eventually, in a world with frequent natural disasters, would insurance premiums jump so high that even top programs would feel they couldn’t afford to pay them?

I genuinely have no idea what would happen then. If I’m being honest, that’s likely a point where we’d have bigger fish to fry in the South than whether the Egg Bowl were being played on schedule.

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Speaking of scenarios where we would have bigger problems to deal with, I’d love to look into what could happen to college football as a result of climate-based migration. The South’s regional advantage has lessened over the past few years as schools have begun to entice recruits with “money” rather than “playing close to home,” but could that talent advantage eventually go away entirely?

Regardless of whether residents believe in climate change, insurance companies certainly do. As premiums jump in danger zones, heat continues to rise and natural disasters become more frequent, will people start leaving the South?

Thinking through that scenario (minus all the other “major societal collapse” issues), could a whole new batch of schools become the standing college football powers? Would the Big Ten suddenly become dominant in a way the SEC used to be? Is P.J. Fleck going to start lobbying for weaker environmental protection laws?

I don’t pretend to know how that all will play out, but surely there’s someone smarter than I am who could figure it out. I’d love to report more on that scenario in the future, but I’d really love to never actually see it come to pass.