Illinois head strength and conditioning coach Lou Hernandez started to discuss a question with his staff Friday that’s quietly simmered on the college football backburner amid the COVID-19 outbreak: “What do we think would be the minimum amount of time to get our guys back?” Penn State head coach James Franklin began initial conversations on that subject earlier this week. Many other coaches nationally have raised the same issue.

“You’re talking about the health and wellness of student athletes,” Washington State head coach Nick Rolovich said last week. “You can’t just show up at training camp and feel like you’re going to get 25 practices in and feel like your guys are prepared to not only put on a good football game but also safety wise.”

College football season remains months away, and many of the questions in the sport’s media circles hinge on whether the season can start on time on Aug. 29. Yet a far more pressing question for coaches and officials is just how much runway is needed for the season to start safely.

Fall camp won’t start until late-July and early-August for the large majority of schools. But the conditioning programs that run in the summer months for nine consecutive weeks serve as a needed ramping-up period ahead of the rigors of fall camp.

“You can’t just turn it on and turn it off,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Thursday.

Thus, the question turns to just how much time a program would need to get its athletes ready. For perspective, here’s an example of how Illinois’ offseason usually flows:

Spring football: General conditioning workouts, much like athletes can practice at home.

Vacation: A multi-week break between the end of spring football and the start of the first summer semester

June: General fitness and conditioning to build up cardio-respiratory system

July: Football-related activities, speed and explosiveness work

August: Full-on football practices in fall camp

Programs schedule months of dedicated conditioning to prep their athletes for the season. There are no scientifically-studied shortcuts, either. Hernandez said he’s been unable to find any sort of study that details a competitive football team ramping up their training in short order.

“There’s not a nice cookie-cutter type of program to follow on that,” Hernandez said.

There is limited evidence that injuries jump after a shortened offseason workout schedule. The NFL CBA negotiations in 2011 pushed well into the offseason, which created a four-and-half-month period in which players were prohibited from any team-related activities or even workouts in the club’s facilities.

Conditioning-dependent injuries – soft-tissue injuries like the ACL, hamstring and biceps – jumped 38 percent during the 2011 season based on the 2007 numbers, per a study by Emory University. Another study found that 12 Achilles tendon injuries occurred within the first 29 days of training camp upon the NFL’s return in 2011; the previous two seasons produced just 16 total Achilles injuries.

Those studies are far from conclusive or definitive – a much larger data set would be required – but high-leverage athletic functions without an extended conditioning window proved dangerous during that limited sample size.

“Hopefully, the NCAA will have some kind of cutoff to say, ‘If we’re not back and doing this organized by this particular date, then here is the option,’” Hernandez said. “We do need time to prepare.”

Preseason practices cannot start more than 29 days ahead of a program’s first scheduled game. That 29-day period allows a program to engage in a maximum of 25 practices. Practice times are also limited to 20 countable hours per week.

Teams, as of 2017, are no longer allowed to hold multiple practices with contact in a single day. Two-a-day practices had been a staple of college football some 10-15 years ago. But that need lessened with year-round training.

“The old-school training camp used to be to get you in shape,” Minnesota head coach P.J. Fleck told 247Sports. “What we’ve done is we’ve really scaled down in August because of the entire year preparing you for the year. Years ago, training camp prepared you for the season. If you didn’t do any preparing before training camp you were fine as long as you worked hard in training camp for those four or five weeks.”

Without full-contact two-a-days and the limit of 20 hours of countable practice, a team’s ability to ramp up ahead of the season is limited without offseason conditioning.

Fleck called June and July “critical.” Rolovich said programs need a good “four to six weeks” to make sure their bodies are ready for training camp. Indiana head coach Tom Allen said he “thinks” June and July would be enough time. Franklin is still discussing with his staff what would be enough. Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly told ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt there should be a “minimum of four weeks of conditioning before you put them into camp.”

“If there’s still a June 1 or July 1 to get that month-and-a-half of work, then get into training camp I think you could be caught up,” Fleck said. “Maybe not as if you didn’t have it. But you’d still have the ability to keep kids really safe.”

June and July remain months away. The question becomes what if the virus continues to ravage the country through the summer and players aren’t able to report until August. If that’s the case, Hernandez said the NCAA would have to allow for allow for additional conditioning sessions within the 29-day window ahead of a season.

“I think all of those things are on the table when it comes to revisions and improvising,” Hernandez said. “Most important is the safety and well-being of these guys to get them prepared for the season.”

Spring practices are already fully canceled in leagues like the SEC and ACC. Bowlsby said last week it’s highly unlikely any sort of spring football activity will occur in the Big 12.

The question of whether football can be resumed at all – remember, the Olympics canceled its late-July event amid an outcry of national committees that athletes could not prepare safely with such a shortened window – looms in the distant future. But for now, how to safely resume football is the front-facing question of the sport’s leaders and coaches. The question of "when" hangs over the discussion.

“This is a new day, and it’ll have to be entirely dictated by circumstances once those circumstances are known,” Bowlsby said. “I don’t think there’s a Crystal Ball on the planet that can tell us what will happen in the coming months.”