The coronavirus pandemic led the Big Ten on Tuesday to postpone its football season until at least the spring semester, making the league the first of the sport’s marquee conferences to abandon plans for games this autumn.
The decision, after weeks of announcements from smaller conferences and some individual schools that they would not play this fall, had potentially substantial implications for the rest of college football.
The move, about five months after the virus’s threat led to the cancellation of the N.C.A.A.’s basketball tournaments, extended the greatest crisis in the history of college sports, a multibillion-dollar industry with extraordinary cultural clout. But, by stopping short of canceling the season outright and saying that it would evaluate the possibility of playing in the spring, the league offered a lifeline for some of the nation’s most celebrated athletic brands, many of which play in the Power 5 conferences.
The Big Ten’s membership includes Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State, Penn State and Wisconsin.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Big Ten commissioner, Kevin Warren, said it had become “abundantly clear that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”
Canceling the season entirely would have assuredly starved schools of tens of millions of dollars in football revenues that oftentimes balance budgets and underwrite lower-profile sports. Now some of that money may prove merely delayed, causing new pain on campuses but perhaps arresting a graver economic calamity for college athletics.
Sports officials have spent months considering whether it would be feasible to hold a football season, with deliberations frequently hobbled by the sport’s governance structure. Although the N.C.A.A. has some power over football, it does not have absolute authority, and so decisions about the precise course of a season were left to individual conferences — each with their own concerns, including media deals, constituencies and levels of risk tolerance.
Some conferences, like the Ivy League, canceled their seasons without ever publicly pursuing an alternative. The Mid-American Conference said it would not play games this fall but would try in the spring.
In recent weeks, the Power 5 conferences — the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12 and the Southeastern — scaled back their plans for the seasons while they harbored some hopes that their teams would be able to play this fall.
The A.C.C. moved to an 11-game schedule, including one out-of-conference game for each team, while the Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC prepared for 10-game seasons that would be played exclusively within individual leagues. The Big 12 opted for a schedule of nine conference games for each team, plus a nonconference matchup. Some of the conferences also delayed the start dates of their seasons and pushed back their plans for league championship games.
Still, some executives were skeptical that the country’s top teams would play a single down before the end of 2020. Even developments that encouraged sports fans, like the release of an updated schedule, were tempered with warnings.
“It changes by the day,” Warren said last week when his league published a schedule. “There’s no guarantee that we’re going to have sports in the fall.”