Credit: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Boy, it is not a good time to be a college ball fan.

On the heels of several other cancellation decisions from other college football-governing bodies, the biggest one of all, Big Ten, has made an unfortunate decision: no college football this season.

According to an anonymous source close to the matter that spoke to the Detroit Free Press, Big Ten will be formally announcing the season’s cancellation on Tuesday. The reason for the cancellation? You guessed it, it’s COVID-19. The presidents of Big Ten held a vote on whether to cancel the season, and it passed in a landslide of 12-2, with only the presidents of Nebraska and Iowa wanting to keep the season on schedule.

According the DFP’s source, Big Ten’s commissioner, Kevin Warren, is hoping for proper season in the Spring, but no formal decisions on restarting have been made as of yet. Whether or not a season even could be held depends heavily on the state of the world at the time in regards to the ongoing pandemic.

Credit: Chicago Tribune

Prior to this cancellation, Big Ten was workshopping a reduced 10-game, conference-only schedule for 2020. However, as the potential long-term ramifications of getting sick with COVID-19 become clearer to the medical community, players have been much more reluctant about getting onto the field; if they catch a particularly nasty case of COVID-19, then not only would they be out for the season, their abilities could be hampered for the entire rest of their careers.

“When we were trying to think about ways to make it safe, we were at a time when there was kind of more control of the virus, and you’ve got less control of the virus now than we had several months earlier during when the stay at home orders were just starting to be lifted,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja of Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “And then the other thing that’s made it what made it much more difficult is football is a contact sport, which is going to require some amount of testing of players. The turnaround times for for outpatient testing are really unacceptable for being able to safely clear somebody to play.”