Honestly, looking back at the 2020 college football season feels like trying to remember a fever dream you had while sleeping in a room that was slightly too hot. It shouldn't have happened. For a few weeks in August, it actually wasn't happening. If you remember the absolute chaos of that summer—the Big Ten and Pac-12 effectively folding their tents only to sprint back to the field a few weeks later—you know that "normal" was a relative term.
We didn't get the tailgates. We didn't get the packed 100,000-seat stadiums. Instead, we got cardboard cutouts, piped-in crowd noise that sounded like a broken radio, and the constant, looming threat of a Saturday morning "game canceled" notification. It was a year defined by the phrase "out of an abundance of caution," yet it somehow culminated in one of the most dominant championship runs in the history of the sport.
The Summer the Big Ten Quit (Then Didn't)
The timeline of the 2020 college football season is basically a series of U-turns. On August 11, 2020, the Big Ten made history for all the wrong reasons. Commissioner Kevin Warren announced the conference would postpone all fall sports. The Pac-12 followed suit almost immediately. It felt like the dominoes were falling, and for about forty-eight hours, everyone assumed the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 would do the same.
They didn't.
Instead, we saw a weirdly localized civil war in sports. Players like Justin Fields started "We Want to Play" petitions. Parents of Ohio State players were literally protesting outside the Big Ten headquarters in Rosemont, Illinois. While the SEC was doubling down on "we’re playing if we have enough guys to field a team," the Big Ten was stuck in a PR nightmare. Eventually, facing massive political pressure and seeing the medical data from the early weeks of the Big 12 and ACC schedules, the Big Ten blinked. They came back in late October, but they came back with a schedule that had zero margin for error. No bye weeks. No room for COVID-19 outbreaks. Of course, that plan blew up almost immediately.
Scheduling on a Cocktail Napkin
The 2020 college football season was the ultimate "pivot." You had teams like BYU who basically lost their entire original schedule and had to rebuild it on the fly, leading to that legendary, last-minute Coastal Carolina matchup that we all obsessed over.
Because the schedules were so condensed and conference-only (for the most part), the data points were all over the place. The SEC played 10 conference games. The Big Ten played... well, some played five, some played eight. Ohio State only played five regular-season games before the Big Ten literally changed its own rules regarding game minimums to let them into the conference championship game against Northwestern.
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It was messy.
Fans of schools like Texas A&M—who went 8-1 in the grueling SEC—were rightfully furious when an undefeated Ohio State jumped them for a playoff spot despite playing about half the football. But the committee was in an impossible spot. How do you compare a team that played in September to a team that didn't start until Halloween? You sort of just guess. And in 2020, the guess was "Ohio State looks better on paper."
The Rise of the "Air Raid" Mac Jones
While the world was falling apart, Nick Saban was busy evolving. If the 2020 college football season had a protagonist, it was the Alabama Crimson Tide offense. People forget that Mac Jones wasn't even the consensus starter going into that year for some analysts. He was the "bridge" guy to Bryce Young.
Instead, Jones, DeVonta Smith, and Najee Harris put up numbers that looked like someone playing Madden on Rookie difficulty. Smith becoming the first wide receiver to win the Heisman Trophy since Desmond Howard in 1991 wasn't just a fluke; it was a byproduct of a season where defenses simply couldn't practice enough. Tackling was atrocious across the country because of limited contact in practices, and Steve Sarkisian exploited every bit of it.
Smith's performance in the National Championship game against Ohio State—12 catches, 215 yards, and three touchdowns in one half—remains one of the most absurd things I've ever seen on a football field. He was a 170-pound stick of dynamite.
The Ghost Games and the Empty Seats
You can't talk about the 2020 college football season without mentioning the atmosphere. Or the lack thereof.
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Watching a night game at Death Valley (LSU) or the Swamp (Florida) with 20% capacity was jarring. The sound was off. You could hear the quarterbacks yelling "Kill! Kill!" or "Omaha!" perfectly clear on the broadcast. It stripped away the pageantry and left only the raw, clinical execution of the game. For some, it was pure. For most of us, it was just depressing.
Florida's Kyle Trask had a season for the ages, throwing for 4,283 yards and 43 touchdowns, but his season is often remembered for the "Cleat Toss." Marco Wilson throwing an LSU player’s shoe 20 yards downfield, drawing a flag, and effectively ending Florida’s playoff hopes is the most "2020" thing that could have happened. It was a year of bizarre mental lapses and strange bounces.
Why the 2020 Stats Should Have an Asterisk (But Don't)
We see these massive passing numbers from 2020, but we have to contextualize them.
- Opt-outs: Hundreds of top-tier players, including Ja'Marr Chase and Penei Sewell, sat out the year.
- Depleted Rosters: Some teams played games with 45 scholarship players because 20 guys were in quarantine.
- Practice Restrictions: Spring ball was canceled for everyone. Fall camp was a mess of zoom meetings and social distancing.
Basically, the 2020 college football season was a year where the offense had a massive advantage. Defenses rely on chemistry, timing, and physical conditioning—three things that are hard to build when you're not allowed to be in the same room as your teammates. This is why we saw scores like 63-48 (Ole Miss vs. Alabama) or 50-48 (UCF vs. USF). It was fun for the scoreboard, but it wasn't exactly a vintage year for defensive coordinators.
The Group of Five's Missed Moment
Cincinnati and Coastal Carolina were the darlings of the 2020 college football season. Luke Fickell had the Bearcats humming, and Jamey Chadwell turned Coastal into a national brand with "Mormons vs. Mullets."
There was a real feeling that if there was ever a year for a Group of Five team to crash the College Football Playoff, it was this one. The chaos was high enough. The "blue bloods" were vulnerable. Penn State started 0-5. LSU collapsed after their 2019 title. Michigan was a disaster. Yet, the committee did what the committee does: they stuck with the brands. Cincinnati got the Peach Bowl nod against Georgia, and they almost won. That game proved that the 2020 version of the Bearcats was legitimately elite, but it also highlighted the glass ceiling that wouldn't be broken until the following year.
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The Lasting Legacy of the COVID-19 Season
The 2020 college football season changed the sport forever, but not just because of the games. It accelerated the "extra year" of eligibility. Because the NCAA granted a free year to everyone who played in 2020, we saw the rise of the "super senior." For the next four years, rosters were bloated with 23 and 24-year-old men playing against 18-year-old kids. It changed the physical profile of the college game.
It also fast-tracked the realization that the players had a voice. The #WeWantToPlay movement showed that when the stars of the game speak in unison, even the most powerful commissioners have to listen. It was a precursor to the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) era. If you can't tell them they can't play, you're going to have a hard time telling them they can't get paid.
What We Learned
We learned that college football is an unstoppable financial engine. The sheer will required to stage a season during a global pandemic was immense. It involved daily testing protocols that cost millions, chartering private planes to keep teams isolated, and a level of logistical gymnastics that would make a circus performer dizzy.
We also learned that Alabama is inevitable. In a year where everything was unpredictable, the most predictable thing happened: Nick Saban holding a trophy while confetti fell in a half-empty stadium in Miami.
How to Evaluate the 2020 Season Today
If you are looking back at 2020 for scouting or historical purposes, you have to look past the raw box scores. Here is how to actually use the data from that weird year:
- Adjust for Sample Size: Never compare an Ohio State player’s 2020 totals to an SEC player’s. Look at "per-game" averages. A guy playing 6 games vs. 12 games creates a massive skew in career counting stats.
- Check the Availability Report: If a quarterback had a terrible game in November 2020, check who was actually playing offensive line that day. Half the unit might have been in a hotel room in quarantine.
- Weight the Competition: Most teams played zero non-conference games. This means strength of schedule was entirely dependent on your conference's depth that specific year.
- Value the "Super Seniors": When looking at rosters from 2021-2023, identify the "2020 holdovers." Those players provided a veteran leadership cushion that won't exist in the same way moving forward as the "free year" athletes finally graduate out of the system.