When Danny Ford coached at Clemson in the late 1970s and all throughout the 1980s, the Hall of Fame head coach was never in a situation concerning his entire football team like Dabo Swinney and the athletic department is in right now.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already forced Power 5 Conferences the Big Ten and Pac-12 to shut down the fall sports seasons. The NCAA has postponed its fall championships until the spring, but the ACC, SEC, Big 12 and four other Group of 5 conferences keep pushing forward to the start of the 2020 season.

Ford does not envy Swinney or any of the other coaches that are having to coach their teams in this COVID-19 world that we all live in.

“I feel for anybody that is trying to make a decision and they don’t know what they are doing,” Ford said prior to the start of the Sharone Wright Benefit Golf Tournament at the Walker Course in Clemson on Monday. “I can’t be convinced that any coach knows what it is right. Nothing wrong with Coach Swinney. I don’t know. Coach Howard wouldn’t know. The greatest coach in the world wouldn’t know what is right and what is wrong because we have never experienced what they are experiencing now. And they don’t have any results on it.

“It is a tough deal. I guess it is like when I took algebra. I did not know what was going on in school.”

Ford believes whatever happens from this point is a gamble for college football. The Big Ten and the Pac-12 took a gamble by postponing their season to the spring. The ACC, SEC and Big 12 are gambling by trying to play a season in the fall.

“It is a gamble, if you play, of somebody dying or getting hurt,” Ford said. “And then if you do play, you wonder why those other people didn’t play. Their gamble is that they lost. They stayed healthy with everybody, but they lost playoff contention. They lost TV revenue. They lost money to operate the school on. They lost a lot of different things that they could have used.

“On the other hand, if they start playing and don’t finish, how does that look? That does not look real good. If you are not going to finish why did you start? You know? How much money did you waste starting that you could have used for different reasons?”

Ford summed up his thought by saying right now there are no winners, but that is because there is no football either.

“So, who is to say we don’t have football, yet? The three conferences, and more than that, the seventy-seven teams that decided they are going to play, maybe they will make the right decision and come out of it in good shape,” he said.

Regardless, Ford does not envy those who have to make those tough decisions.

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