When, and how, might college football return? CFP director talks life, offers insight
From the makeshift epicenter of the College Football Playoff in Prairie Village, CFP executive director Bill Hancock enjoys what he calls “a very nice working situation that I wish I never had” to put to use.
Amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, even as so much is in flux and with so much he laments about its impact on the world, he’s been amazed at how efficiently he can carry out business via phone calls, video conferences and emails.
He’s loved the long walks he’s been taking with his wife, Nicki, at the beginning and end of each work day while grounded at home instead of on the road or at the traditional headquarters in Irving, Texas.
And he’s relished watching movies like “Citizen Kane,” “Forrest Gump” and “Raiders Of The Lost Ark” at night.
He even revels in his nine-weeks-and-counting lunch routine of toast, carrots, asparagus and yogurt. Lest that sound like a rut, sometimes he accents it with grape jelly, sometimes strawberry.
“So that’s my out-of-the-box thinking right there,” he joked.
Sitting at his distinct desktop crafted with a bowling lane, his perch enables him to gaze out the window at people walking and jogging by as if everything were normal.
He smiles at the thought of two neighborhood children, perhaps 6 and 4 years old, regularly circling the driveway that last Thursday he employed for an improvised interview with The Star’s Blair Kerkhoff and me.
All the while with a stuffed animal, Georgia Tech mascot “Buzz,” overlooking us from the porch — salvaged from being given away because the Hancocks heard it might be the sort of thing children are looking for on scavenger hunts during the pandemic.
With our chairs set up at social distance, we spoke about many things over the course of about two hours, catching up in general with our longtime friend and trying to better understand the scope and implications of the virus when it comes to college football.
But what resonated most was the essential stuff that always rings true with Bill Hancock: valuable perspective and an abiding sense of hope.
“To live through this, to live through history … I think it won’t dawn on us for 10 or 20 years that, ‘Wait a minute, I lived through that,’” he said. “We can tell our kids … ‘Hey, I was alive and that really happened. And here’s what it was like.’”
He thought about how he didn’t really believe the stories of the 1918 pandemic until he read more about it. And he thought about something he heard renowned documentarian Ken Burns say in a recent interview: “‘This will be up there with the Civil War and The Depression and World War II as it’s viewed by history.’”
But it’s in the moment, of course, that we’re consumed with now when it comes to something that Hancock reckons has had an impact on every “human being in America … in some way.”
Unrelenting and blinding as it seems, it evokes the image of a blizzard to Hancock.
“When you’re in a blizzard, you think it’s going to snow forever,” he said. “Well, it’s not. And we’re in the blizzard, and we need to remind ourselves that it’s not going to snow forever.”
Part of the way through is navigating the appropriate time and measures to revive our economy and sports and the rest of our culture …
While remembering that any progress is tenuous and a potential resurgence of the virus still lurks just over two months after sports helped spur a vital shutdown.
And the volatility of it all is impossible for him to ignore. Like how there came to be an outbreak in rural Mangum, Oklahoma, just 30 minutes or so from his hometown of Hobart, that is believed to be linked to a visit by an evangelist from Tulsa.
“Sometimes I think about how many lives the NBA saved when they jump-started the dominoes (on March 11), to mix my metaphors,” he said. “Truly. If that had gone on another week …”
Meanwhile, the inverse impact could loom.
Hancock, the former Big 8 and NCAA administrator who has been to the last 41 Final Fours and has been a USOC volunteer at 14 Olympic Games, has developed a fresh notion of how much sports means to our country these last few months.
He certainly knows the role the entertainment and diversion could play now.
But he also knows patience is a virtue … especially when so little is clear that you might as well be trying to grab smoke.
And he’s conscious of the fact that it’s still nearly eight months until the CFP semifinals scheduled on Jan. 1 in New Orleans and Pasadena and the national championship game scheduled for Jan. 11 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.
He hopes there will be a regular season, even believes there will be. But Hancock is averse to just about any conjecture at all. It’s wasted energy, he believes (and I agree), especially with so little to go on.
There’s a difference, though, between speculation and preparation. Hancock allows as how there have been musings and discussions on matters such as how to bring fans into stadiums with social distancing.
“Do you sell only every other row? Do you sell only every other seat in every other row? What is your capacity?” he said, adding that perhaps entries would be staggered by section. “Then, after the game, do you empty the stadium like you might at a funeral service or something where the front goes (out) first?
“Those things are all kind of percolating out there as you think about things. But you just can’t plan, because you don’t know.”
So much so that Hancock believes “there’s almost no real way to describe the uncertainty.”
One way or another, more clarity is coming in the months ahead. College football should benefit from examples before it, whether its Major League Baseball or Major League Soccer or NASCAR or golf. Meanwhile, we should all be rooting less for athletes than for science to work toward a vaccine, Hancock reminds.
While most of us haven’t lived long enough to have encountered anything remotely resembling this, Hancock at 69 is old enough to remember the arrival of what he still calls the (Jonas) “Salk vaccine” for polio.
“I remember not being allowed to go to the swimming pool in the summers,” he said. “And I remember Mother saying, ‘You need to take this Salk vaccine. It’s a miracle. And it will wipe out polio.’”
So as we wait on the solution to the safe re-opening of sports, not to mention the broader world, Hancock has an enduring faith that “the right people” will forge the way ahead with science and medicine.
“You’re not going to be at the bottom forever,” he said. “It’s a little bit like grief. It’s with you, but it’s a roller-coaster. This is a roller-coaster.”
Like so much you can learn from Hancock, it’s a concept we’ll all do better to try to embrace as we seek to cope with the new abnormal ... and the peaks and valleys we’re riding to the imperceptible other side.
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 4:33 PM.