College football fractured on Tuesday as the Big Ten and the Pac-12, two of the sport’s wealthiest and most powerful conferences, abandoned their plans to play this fall during the coronavirus pandemic, even as other top leagues stayed publicly poised to begin games next month.
The decisions extended the greatest crisis in the history of college athletics, a multibillion-dollar industry that often depends on football revenue to balance budgets and underwrite lower-profile sports. It also defied calls this week by coaches, players and President Trump to mount a season in the face of the virus’s largely unchecked rampage across the United States.
Kevin Warren, the Big Ten commissioner, said Tuesday that it had become “abundantly clear that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”
The decision by the Pac-12 universities, expected to be announced later Tuesday, was described by a conference official with direct knowledge of the league’s plans. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a plan that had not been formally announced.
The divergent approaches of the so-called Power 5 conferences, made possible by college football’s decentralized power structure, mean that old and new gridiron powerhouses — including Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Southern California and Wisconsin — will probably not compete this autumn, while other leading programs, like Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Louisiana State, Oklahoma and Texas, may still play.
The Power 5 conferences that could still hold games — the Atlantic Coast, the Big 12 and the Southeastern — intend to begin competition by late September.
The Big Ten’s decision applied to all of its fall sports, and it left open the possibility of playing during the spring semester. But some of the league’s members responded to the move with outrage and frustration.
In a statement, Nebraska officials pronounced themselves “very disappointed in the decision” and suggested that they might somehow try to find a way for their students to compete this fall. Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director, said the university had sought a delay to the season’s start instead of a sweeping postponement.
“This is an incredibly sad day for our student-athletes, who have worked so hard and been so vigilant fighting against this pandemic to get this close to their season,” Smith said in a statement.
Canceling the Big Ten season in its entirety would have assuredly starved schools of tens of millions of dollars. Now some of that money could be delayed instead, causing new pain on campuses but perhaps arresting a graver economic calamity for college athletics.
Still, in a statement on Tuesday, leaders at Wisconsin, which had suggested it could miss out on up to $100 million without a football season, said there would be “a major financial impact on not only our athletic department, but the many businesses and members of our community who rely on Badger events to support their livelihoods.”
In the statement, Rebecca M. Blank, Wisconsin’s chancellor, and Barry Alvarez, its athletic director, warned that there were “many obstacles to overcome” for fall sports to be played early in 2021.
In addition to football, the Big Ten's decision affects men’s and women’s cross-country, field hockey, men’s and women’s soccer, and women’s volleyball.
Sports officials have spent months considering whether it would be feasible to hold a football season in 2020, with deliberations frequently hobbled by the sport’s governance system. Although the N.C.A.A. has some power over football, it does not have absolute authority, and so decisions about the precise course of a season were left to individual conferences — each with its own concerns, including media deals, constituencies and levels of risk tolerance.
Some conferences, like the Ivy League, canceled their season without ever publicly pursuing an alternative. The Mid-American Conference said it would not play games this fall but would try in the spring. And on Monday, the Mountain West Conference said it had settled on an “indefinite postponement” of all of its fall sports.
In recent weeks, the Power 5 conferences scaled back their plans for the season while they harbored some hopes that their teams would be able to play this fall.
The A.C.C. moved to an 11-game schedule, including one out-of-conference game for each team, while the Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC prepared for 10-game seasons that would be played exclusively within individual leagues. The Big 12 opted for a schedule of nine conference games for each team, plus a nonconference matchup. Some of the conferences also delayed the start dates of their seasons and pushed back their plans for league championship games.
Still, some executives were skeptical that the country’s top teams would play a single down before the end of 2020. Even developments that encouraged sports fans, like the release of an updated schedule, were tempered with warnings.
“It changes by the day,” Warren said last week when his league published a schedule. “There’s no guarantee that we’re going to have sports in the fall.”
Just days after Warren spoke, misgivings inside the league and within the broader college sports world intensified. On Friday night, Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, said that “everybody wants fall sports to return — but we can’t do it unless we can find a way to do it with minimized risk for these young people.”
On Saturday, the Big Ten said its teams would not proceed to practices with pads, and it acknowledged “many questions regarding how this impacts schedules, as well as the feasibility of proceeding forward with the season at all.”
By Tuesday afternoon, they had reached their answer.
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