Everybody knows the college football season stands in danger of evaporation. The COVID-19 panic driving many decision makers could sack even the newly announced Big Ten-only schedule.

Michigan Radio basketball play-by-play man Brian Boesch is looking beyond even fall’s potential forearm shiver to millions. He knows that if football falls, the sport he brings to the airwaves is bound for at least a delay of game.

“If football gets shut down, I don’t see any way that college basketball would start on time,” Boesch said on TheWolverine.com Podcast. “I don’t see how that would be feasible.”

Now, Boesch isn’t conceding the football season — yet. Neither are those at Schembechler Hall, prepping for what they hope will be a different-yet-satisfying campaign. Those preparations are taking place in countless college football venues around the nation.

It still says here, they should be. Football is a game marked by violence and passion, but also by great discipline. An extra measure of it, in this case, could mean the difference between playing football this fall and seeing the first (and most crucial) domino tumble.

As stated in this space before, the serious COVID-19 danger for 18- to 23-year-olds is nearly negligible. The question then becomes, how are others — older coaches, officials, fans, families of players — kept safe if a season goes forward?

That involves common sense, which isn’t necessarily found in abundance amid the hysteria. If a particular coach is vulnerable, distance him from players. Older officials, sit this one out. Fans, make good choices, if there are choices to be made — Michigan already announced there will be no public ticket sales for the fall.

Again, keep family members safe by avoiding close contact — for a very short period. Discipline for football players isn’t a foreign concept.

Say you’re not operating in a 60-minutes-of-unnecessary-roughness system. You know better than to grab a quarterback’s facemask and rip it around so that he has a northbound torso and a south-facing visage. It’s simple penalty avoidance.

When the penalty is your football season, how much easier should that discipline be?

Boesch — who also works on Michigan Radio’s football crew — knows there are concerns to take into account when prepping to make the football season a reality.

“Say we do play nine or 10 Big Ten games over the course of September to November … who would I come in contact with over that stretch?” he mused. “That, more than anything else, has to be the measurement.”

Time’s running short on a football decision, he acknowledged.

“The positivity that we felt in April and May about football in the fall was, we have a lot of time,” Boesch said. “Now we’re remembering, hey, life tends to go by pretty quickly. We ran through a lot of that time. That would be the same situation for college basketball, sooner rather than later.”

The positives for basketball compared to football are not inconsiderable, he mentioned. Basketball rosters are much smaller than their football counterparts, and the Wolverines’ logistics for a charter flight are thus more manageable.

“Michigan’s charter plane is pretty big,” Boesch said. “You can socially distance a group of players and coaches by just boarding properly and you can make it work, to keep everybody six feet apart, wear masks, etc.”

On the other hand, Juwan Howard’s crew won’t be playing games in the Crisler Center parking lot.

“From the other side, basketball is indoors,” Boesch mentioned. “We have been encouraged by most of the public health experts and the doctors that it’s better to be outside than inside in situations like we’re in. That’s a negative for basketball.”

For now, Boesch is like a lot of folks — hoping like heck there’s football played in the fall, amid reasonable safety.

“We all know college sports’ main engine is football,” he said. “That’s what brings in the majority of revenue … it’s what keeps things going. Basketball is second, and basketball is really important from the NCAA aspect, because of the tournament.

“If there is no college football, I would not expect to see college basketball start on time. I just don’t know how you can marry those two realities.”

There’s still hope, Boesch noted, with each piece of good news coming forward.

“Where I am drawing optimism is that earlier this week, there was a great, positive prognosis on the first vaccine candidate,” he noted. “Obviously, there’s still a ways to go. They have to go to a full trial, which involves 30,000 people being tested and monitoring the results.

“But that is a positive step. We all know that we have to be risk managers from now until the vaccine is available. When the vaccine comes, we can start to think about normalcy again. Hopefully that comes soon.”

Hopefully … because it’s getting late.

“It’s about risk management, risk awareness, and college basketball will be in that same spot,” Boesch said. “Time goes by. You run out of that ample time pretty fast.”

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