This week, the NCAA is set to take another big stride toward starting the 2020 college football season on time.
The Division I Football Oversight Committee is slated to approve a six-week practice plan that would ultimately allow the first Saturday of the 2020 season for most teams to remain Sept. 5, according to a report from Sports Illustrated on Monday. Teams that are starting their 2020 campaigns in "Week 0" instead of Week 1 will start the plan a week earlier.
According to the proposal, the next step after the current period of voluntary workouts will be summer athletic activities, or "summer access." Starting July 13, players will be allowed eight hours of weight training and conditioning with coaches, and no more than two hours a week of film study.
Beginning July 24 for most programs, players will be allotted 20 hours a week of "athletically related activities," including: the same restraints for training and film review; one hour per day and not more than six hours per week of walk-through practices that can include use of a football; and one hour per day and not more than six hours per week of team meetings, which can be broad, positional or one-on-one.
Four weeks of fall camp begin for programs once 40 hours of athletically related activities are completed — which, for Auburn, would be Aug. 7, only five days later than last year's preseason camp start date.
The usual 20-hour-per-week restrictions will begin the day classes start or seven days before that team's first game of the season.
For Auburn, which has not announced that it will move up its fall semester start date as some other big universities have, is slated to start classes Aug. 17, giving Gus Malzahn and his staff 10 days of unhindered preseason camp with players.
According to the report, coaches and athletic leaders are exploring possibilities for how to conduct preseason practices while adhering to social-distancing guidelines, including the prospect of holding multiple of the same practices in one day, with only portions of players present at a time.
Auburn is already implementing a similar plan during its voluntary workout period, with players working in eight-person pods at a time.
The report states that the NCAA is requiring schools to undergo the full four weeks of practice before playing their first games of the 2020 season. If a local COVID-19 spike affects a program's path to playing its first game, the team will need to adjust its schedule and possibly play less than 12 regular-season games. The NCAA is anticipating that not all 130 FBS programs will play full seasons, the report said.
The NCAA is also looking at universal COVID-19 testing policies for the season, an example of which would be teams testing players Friday before departing for a road game, then again Saturday morning before the game.
As workouts at most programs are beginning this week or next week, testing results are coming back, as well. Specifically, Auburn had three players test COVID-19 positive Friday, and those players are being quarantined in a separate dorm for two weeks with a separate workout plan.
"We’re going to be very slow,” Malzahn said last week of starting workouts. “[Strength and conditioning coach Ryan Russell] is well-prepared to start building that foundation, not assuming anything. We’ve got extra ways to make sure our guys are hydrated more than they normally would. So we’re going to make sure we’ll gradually bring the whole team along.”
Auburn is set to open its 2020 season at home against Alcorn State on Sept. 5.
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