Optimism for a college football season this year has dropped to a new low in the past week after multiple conferences announced major scheduling alterations to fall athletics, including postponements to the spring.

First, the Ivy League declared last Wednesday that it would not entertain any of its fall sports until Jan. 1, 2021. The next day, the Big Ten conference made public that its fall athletic programs, most notably football, will play a conference-only schedule this year.

The Pac-12 quickly followed the Big Ten’s lead in pivoting toward a league-only football season, a potential second domino that now makes it seem inevitable that the remaining Power Five conferences will do the same.

On Monday, the Patriot League went with the Ivy League’s playbook by canceling its fall sports. Because the two conferences play football at the FCS level with little to no financial incentive, the moves were as predictable as they were understandable. At this point, football at the FCS level would seem like a miracle.

Outside of the Power Five conferences, which include the aforementioned Big Ten and Pac-12 plus the ACC, SEC and Big 12, even football at the FBS level seems less likely than winning a scratch-off ticket.

But at the Power Five level, however, completely canceling the 2020 football season could be the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the world of college sports as we know it. Football isn’t just the primary source of profit for most Power Five programs, it pays the bills for the entire ecosystem of collegiate athletics.

Because cancellation may as well be as palatable as a poison pill for a majority of college football programs, the calls for a delay to spring strategy have grown louder. While a move to spring is likely the last-ditch option for the Power Five if it can’t get a season off the ground in the fall, the strategy comes with its own set of risks.

In essence, it’s nothing more than what the plan has seemingly been until now -- let’s just wait around and hope this virus gets contained by 2021.

Rather than canceling too quickly or delaying to the spring, conference-only is a proactive strategy that could end up being the lifeboat of the 2020 football season.