2020 COVID college football season remains difficult to process
The 2020 COVID college football season is now four years ago. A lot has happened since then, most notably the decline of the Alabama and Clemson football dynasties, replaced by Georgia and then Michigan as the champions of the sport. Is there anything to learn from the 2020 COVID season? We all know how weird and unusual it was on a lot of levels. The interesting question is how much we should take from anything which happened that year.
Compare 2020 to 2019 and 2021 in college football. If a given coach or team regressed or improved from one year to another, that instance of regression or improvement might not mean that much, given the disruptive effects of the pandemic on practice, performance, roster cohesion, home-field advantage, and so many other variables in college football during those years. Did certain things which happened in 2020 carry over to 2021, or cease to exist? Did certain things in 2019 carry into 2020 or get interrupted?
Current USC running back coach Anthony Jones was hit by regression in 2020 at Memphis. This could be seen as legitimate reason to question how good Jones is as a running back coach. Yet, was 2020 more about COVID and less about Jones’s coaching acumen? Let’s remember that USC lost just one game (albeit in a shortened schedule) in 2020. No one would say Helton did an especially good job that year, but that only reinforces the point that it was hard to separate on-field results from actual coaching performance in 2020. Whenever you make a 2020-based college football evaluation, be careful.
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