We’re 121 days until the 2020 College Football season is scheduled to kick off with the newly formed Week Zero. As Notre Dame fans know, the Fighting Irish are scheduled to play Navy in Dublin, Ireland, on Aug. 29.

Much has been made over whether this game will be played and where. It makes very little sense to me that a sporting event is alright to play but other mass-gatherings in Ireland are not be. We can discuss that for hours, but instead let’s focus on the potential good news that came from Iowa today for college football fans.

University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld said Thursday the plan at his university is for athletics practices, football included, to start on June 1.

So get excited, right?  Iowa is setting the trend. The rest of the Big Ten will follow and then the rest of college football quickly after.

The good news comes from the reality the coronavirus hasn’t been documented as affecting Iowa as severely as other states so far, allowing talk of a return to be possible. However, turn on the news and you’ll quickly see that for every Iowa, there is a New York, Michigan or Florida where you’re still seeing over 1000 new cases of COVID-19 per day.

I think Harreld comes off perhaps a bit optimistic, but he also gave some reason he sees June 1 as a possible starting point for football and other team activities.

I hope like all getup that Harreld is right.  That would mean the worst of this pandemic would be behind us sooner rather than later and that college football gets started as regularly scheduled, something I have not been optimistic about for quite some time. It was Miami (Florida) head coach Manny Diaz who put everything in perspective as well as anyone I’ve seen so far when he spoke to ESPN this week.

“We all know what we want, but we’ve encountered something that’s unprecedented,” Diaz said. “We have to play it out and see what we can get. That’s the difference. Let’s see how good we can get it. I believe we’ll all be appreciative for whatever we get.”

As much as I hope Harreld is correct, it’s simply way too soon for us to know if things will start on June 1 like he says. Think how differently you may have viewed this pandemic two weeks ago. Now think back a month ago.

Developments change so quickly with this it’s almost impossible to predict athletics getting started like Harreld suggests just a month from now. I’m not sold his beliefs or hopes will play out this way, but I’d be beyond ecstatic to be wrong and for what should be a fun 2020 season to get started after the strangest springs of almost all of our lives.