Oh great, we are talking about COVID-19 again.

You should be used to it by now.

It is great that we have Major League Baseball (for now) going on, the NBA and NHL are both scheduled to start over the course of the next week. NFL Training Camps are set to get underway as well.

All of these starts are important for college football as it waits to see how it is going to attempt to handle things.

Not all of the news has been positive and that has a lot of people worried, as we will tell you later in this piece. There are challenges that college football will face that are unique to the sport and the entire experience when you remember that these are student-athletes and there is no "bubble" for them to ride the season out in. And even if there were a bubble, how do you mandate a 19-year-old sophomore remain in that bubble for five-plus months to try and get a football season in?

In this week's edition of the 3-2-1 brought to you by our friends at Hague Water Conditioning, we try and keep up with the news of the day and over the course of the last week as things change at a rapid pace. We surely are not going to have all the answers but will try and raise a couple of the questions of the day as nobody really knows what is in store for the next month-plus for college football.

1 - Meanwhile, in the MLB

It was great to see Major League Baseball return this past week and see social media, talk radio and message boards have something non-virus related to discuss.

Well, that lasted about four days.

Baseball has not made any grand declaration that it is going away, but the Miami Marlins sent shockwaves through the community when it was learned that as many as 14 players and coaches for the team have tested positive for COVID-19.

The Marlins opened the season in Philadelphia and were slated to head back home for their home opener with the Baltimore Orioles. That won't be happening as that game has been canceled.

Flight arrangements home have been canceled as well, as the Marlins will remain in Philadelphia. Reportedly the visiting clubhouse staff in Philly will be tested and the New York Yankees will bring their own clubhouse staff with them. But even with that, the Monday game between the two teams has been canceled and the rest of that series remains up in the air, at time of publication.

Now the viability of playing any sport "not in a bubble" is back to the forefront and of course the cause and effect to college football is a major topic.

This does not change the fact that major college football is still trying to figure out what it is going to do. The power brokers of the sport said that they would be watching the return to play plan and implementation for all of these other sports "carefully".

Let's not forget that the Washington Nationals lost Juan Soto before the season opener to a positive test just as the Atlanta Braves lost both of their starting catchers and had to go deeper into the player pool after those results were discovered.

Regardless of your view of the size and scope of the COVID issue, this has to be considered a setback to anyone involved.

Just be ready for a wave of "told you so" types to lecture you how sports are a bad idea right now and how you better just prepare yourself for several more months of wandering in the programming wasteland.

It also does bring into question what the motives of the "told you so" crew really are. Are they just that big of humanitarians that they feel it is their duty to deliver unpopular news or if it is more of a need to "be right at all costs" and ride this horse to the end of the race, regardless of the outcome?

2 - Where college football is at, for now

Anybody who was setting "zero positive tests" as the success line of bringing sports back was either way too optimistic or just kidding themselves. There was no way that any sport was going to have a zero-percent positivity rate, especially with heightened testing.

College Football is not going to be able to put its players in a bubble the way that the NBA and NHL are doing. Sure, at Ohio State you could sequester the players at the Blackwell or something similar, have them do their coursework remotely (which already has already been a thing at many major institutions) and create systems to make sure that players are going to practice and staying within the confines of this "bubble" and not hanging out on High Street or at the local pizza shop or at a house party.

But that bubble would have to also include coaches and support staff, anyone who really comes into contact with these players. It doesn't do you any good to keep all of the players in a small space only to have an athletic trainer or GA or position coach going home, coming into contact with the virus, only to spread it amongst the team, who is now in a much smaller case and where the infection rate would surely increase due to the nature of the small spaces.

And just because one school is able to pull this off, does that mean that every school will be able to pull that off?

We have talked about how the Big Ten has gone to a league-only model for this season, if a season takes place. Then the Big Ten would be able to set protocols for testing and other things of that nature and have some uniformity in place when it comes to that.

Other conferences are not there yet, in limiting things to only conference games (more on that in a minute). That is not to say that an ACC team is going to be more lax on testing or player welfare than a Big 12 team or so on, but it does remind us that Division I-FBS football does not report to any sort of overall commissioner on these matters.

It took years and years to get a bowl collation. It took even more years to get a college football playoff.

What has not changed is these member schools need to find a way to play the sport if at all possible without putting its athletes and coaches in harms way. Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez came out and made a statement saying that his program could see 100 million of a 140 million dollar budget evaporate without playing football.

Even if we do have a season, Camp Randall will get nowhere near full in terms of fans and there will be losses but it could be cataclysmic for non-rev sports if football is not played and budgets crater.

3 - Not everyone agrees on scheduling practices

This section was already written before the world went crazy with where Major League Baseball went on Monday morning, and because of that, might feel a little less important.

If, and that is a big 'IF' we have a season, we know that not all of the Power Five conferences have the same idea when it comes to scheduling games. That much was known weeks ago, even after the Big Ten (and then followed up by the Pac 12) came out and said they were going league only.

But more information started to come out as the days went by of how other leagues might be looking at things. The SEC and ACC have talked somewhat about a plus-one model where it would be league games on the schedule plus an additional "crossover" rivalry game where natural rivals like South Carolina and Clemson or UGA and Georgia Tech would be able to have that additional game on the schedule.

The Big 12 seems to be just fine playing teams from outside of the Power Five leagues as Oklahoma announced on Sunday that it was moving its opening game against Missouri State to "week zero" on August 29th. That certainly does not look like the league is looking to shed non-conference games for now.

Of course all of this could just become a moot point if things really derail in the coming days and weeks. But it does show that there are several different schools of thought for scheduling.

Now, could the news coming out of Major League Baseball force conferences to look more inward as a result? Possibly.

There were a lot of hopes that we might have an idea of what a Big Ten schedule might look like this week, at least a little bit more in terms of the structure. But even that may be in a bit of a hold as both Rutgers and Michigan State are currently in "pauses" from their workout schedules after upticks in positive tests.

Once again this proves that we really don't know anything definitive when it comes to this virus and everyone is just going to have to be patient as things change by the hour in some cases.

1 - What does this all mean?

When I was assigning segments to this piece, I felt this could be the shortest of longest of all of the segments.
I am going to opt for the shortest route, and here is why.

We don't know. We really don't. This is supposed to be a question and sometimes we have answers to the questions and other times we don't.

This time we don't.

Have an answer that fits the data on Monday afternoon? Great, it won't mean anything by Tuesday night. Or Friday. Or two weeks from now.

2 - Whatever happened to CJ Saunders?

Ohio State (or maybe former) wide receiver CJ Saunders apparently is still waiting on a NCAA decision if he will have a final year of eligibility for this season or not.

We all know that the NCAA moves at its own pace but we have seen transfer eligibility decisions ride through much quicker as well as several other "sixth year" requests from across the nation.

But still not a peep on Saunders at this point.

Ohio State is up against its cap of 85 scholarships right now and will have to get a little creative if the NCAA does approve Saunders' request for an extra year of eligibility.

If Ohio State defers the enrollment of Jake Seibert to the class of 2021, that would put Ohio State right at 85 of 85 slots, without Saunders counting against the cap. But if the NCAA does grant the extra year, even with moving Seibert off to the next season, Ohio State would be at 86 and a move would have to be made to get Ohio State 'right' in its numbers before the start of the season.

It certainly has not helped the cause of figuring out the numbers without having much of a spring practice session (Ohio State made it through three practices before the world went upside down) and losing much of the summer. Generally during that time, players who might not be in the plans are able to see where they stand and might decide to enter the transfer portal and look for opportunity elsewhere.

The Buckeyes have seen some of that attrition but if Saunders is given the green light for one more season, Ohio State will need one more player to either move on or come off the count (i.e. medical hardship or retirement, etc... ) in the coming weeks.

Virginia already punted on its season as has California, and other high school associations are looking at the viability to play football in the fall.

Don't look for players to sit around and wait to play spring football in high school, there is going to be an all-time high demand for players to try and enroll early at their college choices and Ohio State won't be any different.

The Buckeyes had more than a dozen this past season and the way the numbers work, that means it could be just about the same numbers this year.

There will be some players who won't be able to take advantage of that because of either not having all the core classes done in time or just the fact that their school does not offer the early graduation path.

I would not be surprised to see the NCAA work with the schools this year to open up the gates a little bit more to allow even more players to take the mid-year path, provided they have been certified by the Eligibility Center.

Hell, we never thought we would get into a day and age where the standardized tests (ACT/SAT) wouldn't matter. Strange times we are in.