STARKVILLE — For as much as Mississippi State baseball coach Chris Lemonis misses the smoky grills and smells of cooked meat emanating from the outfield at Dudy Noble Field, the only tailgating he hopes fans enjoy this fall is preparing to watch the Bulldogs’ football team.
With the 2020 college baseball season canceled due to the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, coaches and fans have offered ideas on how the season could be salvaged with games in the fall. But for Lemonis, the idea of putting together an entire conference season between August and December is more a pipe dream than a feasible reality.
“We need a fall season, and it needs to be football,” Lemonis said through a laugh. “I think everyone in NCAA athletics realizes that we need to have college football this fall. College football runs athletic departments, and we need college football out there.”
Over the past week, The Dispatch spoke with head coaches at MSU, LSU, Missouri, Louisville, Indiana and Wofford to discuss the potential for a fall season and whether it’s a possible remedy for the lost spring.
At the heart of the fall season debate is Wofford head coach Todd Interdonato. Now in his 13th season as the head man in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Interdonato’s pitch for a fall campaign in which schools play their conference slates before a makeshift NCAA tournament that could be hosted at MLB ballparks or spring training facilities has gained traction over social media in recent weeks.
Beyond the appeal of playing games with national championship ramifications at professional ballfields, he also stresses his model poses a swift solution to the potential scholarship issues raised by the extra year of eligibility the NCAA is expected to extend to spring athletes this week.
At present, the NCAA limits college baseball teams to 11.7 full scholarships per year. Should it offer extra eligibility to seniors or to entire rosters, a resolution would likely need to be reached to allow teams a larger allotment of financial aid.
That said, if teams let the results of the completed spring games stand and play their respective conference seasons in the fall, it would eliminate backloaded rosters and the potential for a larger transfer market that stands to arise with more players in the fold with extra eligibility.
While Interdonato’s theory is, at its core, radical, there’s layers to its potential issues with which teams already cope.
For one, Louisville coach Dan McDonnell — a former college teammate and longtime friend of Lemonis — sees the potential to use the impending football season as a way to further drive attendance numbers at baseball games.
Now in his 13th year with the Cardinals after previous stops at Ole Miss and The Citadel, McDonnell said he and his staff already schedule their two allotted fall exhibition games around football games for this exact reason.
“We piggyback football in the fall,” he said. “So even when we weren’t playing other teams, we would set our scrimmage up four hours before the football game or four hours after the start of the football game. Then when they said you can play two opponents, we immediately looked at our home football schedule and we thought, ‘OK, the football team that’s coming here, can we play their baseball team,’ and we’ve done it the last two years with like Western Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky.”
And while the theoretical addition of a fall season has its positives, issues still remain. Most notably, who will actually play in the hypothetical games remains a major question.
According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the MLB and MLB Players Association reached an agreement last week to move the First-Year Player Draft from June 10 to as far back as July 20 with a signing date as late as Aug. 1.
The draft is also expected to be moved from its usual 40 rounds to as few as five — flushing the top-flight talent across college baseball this season from any potential fall campaign.
Further compounding the issue, adding innings to college pitchers who are already under a tight microscope when it comes to pitch counts creates another major snag.
“It’s actually more harmful than good for the player,” Indiana head coach Jeff Mercer told The Dispatch. “If you think about this, how the hell are we gonna pitch? Who’s gonna pitch in these games? We’re going to have like 12 arms. And it’s kind of like football games — you’re going to have three-inning starts; you’re going to shut them down because you have to play 65 games in the spring.”
A longtime voice for college baseball and its coaches and players, LSU head coach Paul Mainieri is also wary of how the NCAA would react to pushing forward legislation in a world that is already on edge due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“No matter how common sense it may seem, to try to get something shoved through with the NCAA would be so difficult at a time like this that I haven’t really thought that there’d be much chance of something like that,” Mainieri told The Dispatch.
“It’s nice that coaches are being creative in their thinking,” he continued. “And if it was up to the coaches, I think we could come up with a good plan that would be great for the kids and great for the sport and erase some of this confusion about roster sizes and so forth. But a lot of ideas die at the level of the coaches because trying to get something pushed through the NCAA is so difficult.”
Speaking with The Dispatch last week, MSU Athletic Director John Cohen voiced similar sentiments to Mainieri. A former head baseball coach at MSU and Kentucky, Cohen is taking a never-say-never approach to the potential for a fall season, but he’s not overly optimistic.
A member of the Division I Baseball Council, he added that the group didn’t even broach the topic of fall baseball in its meeting March 20.
“That doesn’t mean that it won’t come up, especially with the council, but it wasn’t brought up in our meeting,” Cohen said.
Monday, the NCAA Division I council is expected to vote on a resolution for spring athlete eligibility. Whether a fall baseball season ever comes to a vote down the line or even receives serious consideration from the powers that be remains to be seen.
Between Cohen and Lemonis, the MSU contingent of baseball-related decision makers are seemingly content to wait until next spring.
For Interdonato, he’s hoping those in the NCAA and those around college baseball simply think a little more openly about the possibility of bringing action back to the diamond this fall.
“I think my wife would tell you that if I walked downstairs and handed the phone to her, I think she would tell you that that’s my big thing,” he said. “Stay patient, stay socially responsible, stay patient and stay open minded.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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