The COVID-19 pandemic is currently impacting every aspect of daily life. Social distancing and isolation are now the new norm, and there’s a great deal of uncertainty as to when daily life will return to normal. Most spring sports leagues across the globe have suspended play or even cancelled the season altogether. While the 2020 college football season does not kick off for another five months, fans are starting to come to grips with the reality that cancelling the 2020 season is not off the table.

Last week, ESPN announcer Kirk Herbstreit – one of the most respected figures in the sport – made headlines when he made the sobering prediction that the 2020 season will be cancelled. This got me wondering – do most college football fans agree with Herbstreit? To answer this question, I recruited over 3,000 college football fans from across the nation to answer some simple survey questions about their level of concern and how they think the 2020 college football season will be impacted.

So just how concerned are college football fans?



The graph above is a rare, real-world example of an approximate bell curve. The average college football fan is most likely to be at the top of the curve in the “somewhat concerned” category, which is the absolute middle of the concern scale. College football fans are about as equally likely to be on the left side of the curve (the less concerned side) as the right side (the doomsday scenario). The big implication of these results is that there’s no consensus as to how worried college football fans should be.

These results align with the research my colleagues and I at MDRG are currently doing. We’re doing a weekly study tracking consumers’ habits and emotions around the current situation, and a big takeaway so far is that most people’s emotions have been impacted by a loss of control over what is happening. When people lose control, they don’t agree on how to assess situations because they don’t know what to expect anymore. This is a relatively simple, but also quite profound point to consider.

These results demonstrate that the average college football fan is coming to grips with the fact that there will probably be some modifications to the 2020 college football season. A small majority indicated they expect some modifications such as shorter games or a delayed start of the season. Only about a quarter (23%) indicated they felt the season would happen like it usually would.