And with COVID, it’s the perfect time to rebuild.
I'd have to disagree.
I would agree it's a good time to tank or lose since the ticket and concession money is down anyway, so it's not much skin off your nose to throw a bad product on the field this year. But the draft is a whole other kettle of fish.
Given how much the college football season has been thrown out of whack, the scouting process and the draft this year might be way more dicey than in a normal year.
Scouts can't travel as freely. Fewer games are being played, so way more guys than normal will get drafted or snubbed based on nothing better than, like, 16-month old out-of-date film.
And the film they do have from 2020 will be influenced by the bizarre offseason, which saw tons of college athletes left to figure out their dietary situation and their workout situation for themselves. Or, if they had coaches trying to keep in touch and instruct them how to proceed, you're still relying on a bunch of dummies in the 18-22 male demographic to make good food choices and to work just as hard without an authority figure over their shoulder. So there are guys whose 2020 film will look artificially worse because the guy's bad offseason seeped into the regular season and made him play worse. And there will be guys whose highlight reel from 2020 will include chunks of footage where they were just feasting on some out-of-shape, poorly prepared kid whose body and game was shot to hell in the offseason.
The 2021 draft class is gonna be bizarre, I think.
And that's all just looking purely at the football and workout and scouting logistics. Who knows how many of the kids got the virus and lingering damage to their lungs/heart causes issues the teams just aren't used to seeing from world-class athletes in their twenties. NFL teams' medical staffs are full of people who are making a career of looking at relatively healthy twenty-somethings in world-class shape. Ankles and knees and shoulders and concussions and the normal football injuries are easy for them. But does the team have a great pulmonologist and cardiologist on staff? There will be guys in the draft class who are ticking time bombs and they'll be retiring early with heart issues. There will be guys whose lung capacity just isn't where it should be anymore thanks to this, and they'll wash out quick with people thinking they just look a bit slow or tired or lazy, not realizing it's because of their lungs keeping them from being able to be the athlete they used to be just a couple years ago.