As the world waits to see how medical advancements, social distancing and other efforts affect the spread of the coronavirus, college football fans can only wonder about the immediate future of the sport.

Over the next several days, the Warchant staff will discuss several issues related to that topic based on the information currently available.

We begin today with the big-picture debate surrounding two possible scenarios for the 2020 season, if it cannot be played as currently scheduled. One scenario is pushing the start date back a month or more and playing a shortened season in the fall. Another is moving the entire season to the spring and possibly playing from February into May.

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In this installment of Crisis Management, Warchant's Gene Williams, Ira Schoffel, Corey Clark and Aslan Hajivandi discuss the positives and negatives of each approach.

Q: The NFL is reportedly looking at starting its season in mid-October if it's not feasible to start on time. If college football can't start in late August or early September, does it make more sense to play a condensed season and eliminate non-conference games, or move the entire season to the spring and deal with those scheduling conflicts?

GENE: If it’s at all possible, college football needs to be played in the fall.

Before we go into all of the details, we need to recognize that this concept of delaying the season until the spring was thrown out there as a worst-case scenario. Some people mistakenly latched on to it as a strong possibility, but I don’t think they really thought through all the potential pitfalls and hurdles that would come with moving the season back five or six months.

Not only would college football conflict with key spring sports like baseball and basketball, but there’s also the pesky NFL draft standing in the way. Most draft-eligible players would probably elect to bypass a spring season to devote their time to training and preparing for what might be the most important day of their pro careers. In looking at Florida State’s 2020 roster, this could easily account for over half of the starting lineup. As such, teams would be forced to play with drastically reduced rosters.

There also would be huge obstacles to overcome in terms of scheduling (and coordination with other sports), logistics of having available venues to play at, TV contracts, internal contracts within athletics (IMG, Nike), potential travel conflicts, and so on. And to top it off, student-athletes returning for 2021 would barely have any time off to rest and heal before resuming practice for the next season. Point is, playing a reduced schedule in the fall with few (or no) fans is substantially more practical than trying to completely move everything to the spring.

So what would a fall season look like? That’s the million-dollar question, and your guess is probably as good as mine.

But for argument’s sake, let’s assume the COVID-19 curve bottoms out over the summer, that testing is readily available and that students are back in school in the fall. In that scenario, starting the season in October is certainly a reasonable possibility. So, FSU could begin practice in September and play the remainder of its 2020 schedule as is currently laid out, starting at N.C. State on Oct. 3.

That would mean not playing the first three games (West Virginia, Samford and Boise State). I could also see long road trips being discouraged, so maybe the home game vs. Boston College (11/14) and game at Syracuse (11/19) are cancelled. Instead, FSU could match up against Georgia Tech, which is currently scheduled to host Notre Dame on Nov. 14, and possibly get Samford back on the schedule in late November.

There is a very strong motivation across the board for college football to be played this fall. If it’s practical and there are reasonable safeguards in place, there’s a good reason to be optimistic that it will happen. But as with everything involved in this pandemic, only time will tell.