Programs were forced to deal with illnesses to their players and to opponents’ rosters. If you want to know what our life will be like when sports comes back, look no further than 1928 when the Spanish Flu hit the entire country. What would college football do if campuses were shuttered in the week leading up to conference championship games? Fielding Yost’s Michigan squad, then part of what was known as the Western Conference before it became the Big Ten, kicked off its season as scheduled in late September before resuming with four games in November. Let’s look back at 1918 to get a better understanding of why Kirshner and others are positing the theory that next season will be anything but business as usual. Sign In/Register. We'll never pass along your email address to spammers, scammers, or the like. In October 1918 alone, there were 195,000 deaths from the Spanish flu just in the United States. However, not every team was back in action. Five of the victories were against fellow members of the Southwest Conference, formed four years earlier. Pitt, which played as an independent, went 4-1 under Pop Warner. The U.S. War Department established military training units, the Student Army Training Corps, at numerous colleges across the country. I don’t know what happens — there’s not a model, there’s not a solution, there’s not an action I can take that’s going to solve that problem.”, Photo of Fans at Georgia Tech Football Game During Spanish Flu in 1918 Resurfaces Amid COVID-19 (PIC). Build your custom FanSided Daily email newsletter with news and analysis on All College Football and all your favorite sports teams, TV shows, and more. With that in mind, how might the novel coronavirus coursing through the country impact the 2020 college football season? As people are experiencing now with college basketball and other sports, in 1918 college football was not immune to the disruptions caused by Spanish flu. When the Spanish flu — named not because it originated in Spain, but rather because neutral Spain was the first government to report honestly on the transmission of the virus — returned to the American populace in 1918, the college football season was thrown into a tailspin. Despite differences with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, there also are many similarities in the response. The Missouri Valley Conference, the forerunner to the Big 8 and Big 12, closed down completely as all seven of its member schools decided not to play football in the midst of the pandemic. They played five games in November and finished 3-1-2. By March, when an infected cook at Fort Riley reported for duty, the virus found a population in close quarters through which it could spread rapidly. I am a member of the Football Writers Association of America and the National Football Foundation.