Ohio State Football: How viable is November start for Big Ten season

2020 has been a rollercoaster year, and for Ohio State football it has been no different. With a plan in place from the Big Ten to begin the season around Thanksgiving weekend, just how viable will that plan be?

Before diving into how dependable that plan may be, we must first take a dive into what that preliminary plan looks like.

The first step to consider is scheduling and logistics. If all or most of the 14 Big Ten teams can reach an agreement to play this fall, whether that remains around the tentative Thanksgiving weekend start time, scheduling shouldn’t prove to be an issue.

However, logistics is a bigger problem to consider. Each and every Big Ten team plays in outdoor venues, and with a potential start time set for late November, the wintry conditions Ohio State fans are accustomed to living through would be extremely difficult to play through.

Because of this, the Big Ten seems likely to go to domed stadiums, although it is possible the first game or two could be outdoors, as teams are used to playing outside in the first weekend of November.

Indianapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and potentially even Syracuse are being looked at (though likely only Penn State, Maryland, and Rutgers would play there), though a problem arises because Syracuse football and basketball both play in the Carrier Dome, which would be the obvious venue to host these games.

With the premise of this potential shift being pure speculation, let’s look at where the Buckeyes would play the ten games that were scheduled in the updated schedule from before the postponement, and assuming some sense of home-field is kept (no middle-ground, pure neutral location).