The 2020 college football season is up in the air amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with no one particularly sure what’s going to happen.

It does seem like football will happen at some point, but whether the season starts on time or gets pushed back as far as the spring is up for debate.

On Friday, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey joined Jimmy Hyams and John Wilkerson on Sports Radio WNML and said the SEC isn’t rushing into any decisions (via 247Sports):

“The beauty of April 17 is I don’t have to answer that question right now. I think one of the great learning experiences that I have enjoyed, if there’s such thing as enjoying the last 30 days, is how much we’ve learned over that period of time — as we’ve talked to researchers and positions, their encouragement has been that we’ve learned a lot, we will learn a lot, and we should wait to make major decisions. I’ve avoided the hypotheticals and tried to prepare for what’s in front of me right now.”

Interestingly, Sankey did seem to indicate that there could be a scenario where the SEC plays football this fall even if there are other conferences that don’t:

“If you look back when we were deciding how to approach basketball tournaments, each of those decisions was an independent decision by a conference,” Sankey said. “You saw the Ivy League make a decision on a Tuesday. We made a decision to cancel our event based on new information on Thursday morning. There’s probably a lesson or example in the fact that we are independent entities. Part of what’s now happened since that time is there’s a lot of conversation, certainly among the autonomy conferences — us, the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-12, and the preference would be to go down a road together. The NCAA has a football oversight committee. They have others active in thinking about this. Now if there is one small niche that’s inactive but perhaps the Southeastern Conference and others are able to function, that’s one of those hypotheticals we don’t have to answer right now but you’d think there’d be a bit of room in that decision making.”

There’s still time for things to change, but for now, it seems we are trending in a positive direction.