In a normal school year, members of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team would have just returned to campus to begin the spring term, with a little time to rest up after a fall semester full of football games and a renewed focus on the winter workouts coming up.
But as everyone knows, 2020 wasn’t a normal year. And these aren’t normal times. So when the Mocs returned over the weekend, they did so in anticipation of two weeks of winter workouts that will lead up to official practices – not those of the “spring” variety – starting in early February. It’s all in preparation for a spring semester season in the Football Championship Subdivision, with the Southern Conference playing an eight-game schedule.
The Mocs – who played one game in 2020, a 13-10 loss at Football Bowl Subdivision member Western Kentucky on Oct. 24 – will kick off their league slate with a home game against Virginia Military Institute on Feb. 20. The FCS playoffs will run from mid-April to mid-May, with the field limited to 16 teams (11 league champions and five at-large selections) instead of 24 for this edition.
So with practice upcoming, the Times Free Press offers five potential storylines for the spring:
1. The Mocs won’t play all four of their scheduled home games at Finley Stadium: Ah, the UTC-Finley issue again. The Times Free Press reported in 2018 that the school was looking to build a new facility around Engel Stadium and break away from the place it has called home since 1997, and we stand by that. (There are currently more pressing concerns, such as breaking ground on the new athletic complex, which we’ve been told is expected to happen in March). More immediately, there are concerns that Finley won’t be ready to host the Mocs’ first two home games, with Wofford coming to Chattanooga a week after VMI. It’s a complicated situation, because UTC didn’t request to play in the spring and and Finley didn’t expect to need to have its facilities ready at that time. But here we are with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to alter routines, and with the possibility of having 25% capacity at games, the Mocs may need a place to play to start the schedule. So the question is, does UTC choose to play football at Finley without fans, meaning no revenue? Or does UTC choose to find an alternate site for those games in an attempt to bring in some money and risk the image hit of playing at a high school venue, such as McCallie’s Spears Stadium or Baylor’s Heywood Stadium? I question how good of a look it would be if the hometown team isn’t playing home games at the facility once built for it.