Cohen confident football will be played this year

Mississippi State athletic director unsure of time frame, but believes football season will happen

In uncertain times, John Cohen has optimism. In fact, the Mississippi State athletic director seems to be even a step further than optimistic when it comes to the chances of a 2020 football season. The Bulldog boss says he's confident MSU will hit the gridiron somehow, someway at some point.

"I have a lot of confidence in the fact that we’re going to play football this year," Cohen said on Tuesday. "I’m not 100 percent sure the timeframe. Even though that’s not the answer anybody wants to hear, it’s the reality that we’re faced with and we’re going to get as much information as we can, especially over the next two weeks, and make the best decision we can for our student-athletes, our staff and for our great fans across the Southeastern Conference."

About the only thing for sure regarding fall football right now is that, well, nothing is for sure. The MSU season is set to kick off on September 5. However with rising COVID-19 case numbers in the state of Mississippi and around the Southeast, it seems unlikely at this point the 2020 campaign will begin on schedule. That hasn't been made official, but a glance around the country shows it's going to be anything but business as usual this season.

Multiple conferences have already announced plans to move to league-only schedules. Some, like the Southwestern Athletic Conference, have now cancelled fall sports and moved them to the spring. 

What will the SEC do? Well, again, right now it's a guessing game. That's the case even for high-ranking administrators like Cohen.

"It’s just really impossible to tell what direction it’s going to take," Cohen said. "I have the utmost confidence in our conference commissioner, Greg Sankey. He will have a very difficult decision. He has gotten a lot of input from everyone in our league. There are lots of decisions to make. All the parts of it have been talked about at great length. Is it a conference-only schedule? Is it going to happen in the fall? Is it delayed in the fall? Does it go to the spring?"

Sankey said recently he's looking to announce a decision of some kind by the end of the month. And so, as most everyone has done since the spring, there's little to do but wait and see. 

On the MSU front though, there are two certainties. One, the athletic director is confident football will happen in some fashion. And two, he says Bulldog players (in football and other fall sports) are chomping at the bit.

"There’s no question after talking to our student-athletes, they want to play," Cohen said. "And I’m talking about our volleyball players. I’m talking about our soccer players. I’m talking about our football players. They want to play. This has been something that has been a part of their lives since they were little kids and they don’t want to stop playing their sport and we want to do everything we can to see if we can make that happen."