Creeping attrition

So the Bastard Plague has sidelined Notre Dame this week, and here are the predictions of all us Nervous Nellies outlined in red. The national pathogen can put Directional Hyphen Tech in stasis, and everyone will just carry on as usual. But when it's Notre Dame that gets bitten ...

Here are the numbers: Seven positive tests on top of four last week and now there's 10 players in quarantine and 13 in isolation following contact tracing and positive tests, and there goes the Wake Forest game this week. And there has already gone a multitude of other games among the Power 5s, and we're not even through September yet.

I don't know what this bodes for October and November. A fine mess, I suspect.

Creeping attrition being what it is, the deeper we go into the season, the more players are going to wind up in 14-day quarantines, and that will eventually necessitate not just postponing but canceling games. And what happens then? How do you schedule around a pandemic?

That has always been the question here, and it's one the Play Football And Let The Virus Sort 'Em Out crowd has tried hard to ignore. The assumption was if you took every possible precaution and protected your players like the valuable assets/line workers they are (I'm sorry, "student-athletes" bwah-ha-ha-ha), that this would be just another college football autumn -- albeit without fans and tailgaters and parking lot alumni reunions and, you know, pretty much everything that makes college football what it is.

But let's look at Notre Dame, which for the second time in two months has hit pause on all football-related activities.

The ACC has incorporated a number of bye weeks into its rewired schedule to remedy just the situation that's arisen in South Bend. And so the Fighting Irish and Wake Forest have several open dates they could play the game that was supposed to be played Saturday.

They could make it up Oct. 3, but that's only if there are no more positive tests and no more players going on the quarantine shelf for 14 days. And if there are, that would not only make Oct. 3 a no-go, but it would also put the Irish's Oct. 10 date with Florida State in jeopardy. That would leave two games to make up and only one more scheduled bye week (Nov. 21) to do so.

Now, teams with postponed games could always make them up Dec. 12, the date of the ACC championship game. The ACC has said in that case, it would simply move the title game to Dec. 19. 

Of course, that's assuming the two teams involved don't themselves have a pile of players in quarantine by then. 

I know. It makes my head ache, too.