Tuesday was an historic day for college football. After a bit of wavering and a bit more deliberation the Big Ten conference presidents voted to postpone the 2020 football season.

Shortly thereafter the Pac-12 conference announced the suspension of all athletic competition for the remainder of 2020.

So what does that mean? Here are reflections from Cats Illustrated publisher Justin Rowland.

A difficult decision that requires more explanation

If we're being honest it's easy to see how good people can come to different conclusions about college football and COVID-19. There are so many issues, from player safety to huge financial fallout and liability that touches on both money and health.

There are plenty of people who feel given the state of the pandemic in the United States that college football shouldn't happen, either as a matter of student-athlete safety or because players are not actually employees of universities because of their amateur status.

At the same time, it's going to be difficult for school presidents to justify canceling football on the grounds of player health and safety if they are going to allow tens of thousands of regular students on campus and cramped into dorms, classrooms, bathrooms, and everywhere else together. (It remains to be seen if in-person schooling will actually happen most places, or how long it will happen if the year starts that way.)

The real issue is liability. Universities can be on the hook legally for athletes who become sick with the virus if they are participating in sports. This could become a burden so large it would be difficult to fathom the scale of the issue. If an athlete becomes sick and football is not taking place then the university is not on the hook.

This is an understandable concern and we should be able to sympathize with a president in that position. At the same time, it does seem that if players signed a waiver absolving the university for responsibility then the issue would be solved. There would be a lot more players opting out and only after that initial check-in would we know what the landscape is like.

That's where the optic issue comes in. If a player gets sick or, God forbid, dies from the new coronavirus, that waiver will not look good. But given the opt-out option, should that be an option for schools and conferences to take up? These are difficult questions.

Amateurism remains an issue

The NCAA wishes the amateurism issue could go away and so do some fans, who feel that players are accommodated enough, and compensated enough via scholarships and cost of living stipends.

The simple fact is college football would be a lot easier for some people to digest if players were compensated beyond what they are now. Logistically it's going to be a lot easier for name, image, likeness compensation to go through in the very near future than it will for colleges to work through the thorny issues associated with paying players themselves. But the pandemic and other social issues recently have shined a light on the issue and for some hardened opinions even more.

I'd like to believe this could have been a grand bargain moment. There are probably a lot of folks out there who would have been more willing to budge on amateurism if it meant football for the Big Ten, Pac-12, and whoever else decides to cancel. The timing would have been rough to make that happen, but maybe they could have hammered out a preliminary framework for making it happen. As it stands, the decision was made more by fear, which can certainly be justified in this case, but to me it's the latest reminder that so many institutions in our country seem almost irreformable in paralysis on the big issues.

Finding a commissioner for the sport would help solve some of these issues but not all of them.

Kentucky's recruiting pitch in the Midwest got stronger

Time will tell whether this remains true. If the SEC cancels football this fall then there won't really be any long-lasting impact, other than the fact that the Big Ten put their reluctance and unwillingness to play up front earlier than any other Power Five league.

Kentucky relies on Midwestern talent more than any other school in the conference. Don't expect the Wildcats to start cleaning up with players that would have picked Ohio State but this will make Vince Marrow and Steve Clinkscale's jobs in Ohio and Michigan easier.

It will also probably worsen the Big Ten's brand with players in others parts of the country. Purdue has more commitments from the Commonwealth than any other out of state program during the Rivals.com era and Ohio State is recruiting Rivals250 offensive lineman Jager Burton.

A lot may be riding on the Big 12

It's impossible to know for sure but based on reports it sure reads and sounds like the Big 12 has a lot of power right now. The SEC seems intent on playing. The ACC seems to be trending in that direction. But the Big 12 could determine the fate of the sport entirely in 2020.

At one point there was a report that the SEC wanted to see at least two other Power Five conferences and at least one Group of Five conference play alongside it. The Group of Five issue is resolved at least for now with the AAC, Conference USA, and the Sun Belt planning on forging ahead.

If the Big 12 were to start to waver and eventually decide against fall football it would hurt the SEC and ACC's public relations push for a season.

Radical conference realignment possibilities

In recent days there have been plenty of scenarios and possibilities floated given all the uncertainty.

Many have wondered if certain schools might attempt to explore the possibility of playing a season without Big Ten affiliation.

Ohio State coach Ryan Day said, paraphrased, that the school owes it to the players to exhaust every possibility in trying to make a season happen. Penn State's James Franklin seems to have hinted at the same possibility.

There's plenty of reason to be skeptical about this happening. There wouldn't be much time for it. It doesn't seem all too reasonable because of the timeframe.

But that won't stop the speculation and the possibility of super-conferences has always loomed in the realignment discussion.

On what the doctors are saying

We don't have access to much of the information that presidents are looking at from medical experts but we do know a bit. The Big Ten and schools in other leagues have dealt with a number of unique heart cases that could have some relation to COVID-19.

On the flip side, an ACC medical advisor went public with his recommendation that football could be as safe as regular in-person school attendance.

That doctor did not say football was "safe" per se, and it's worth mentioning that another doctor could look at whatever evidence this doctor did and decide it's not worth the risk. But the point seems to be that the medical advisors across the Power Five leagues are not unanimous in their recommendations or preferences, and thus it's more about the amount of risk acceptance one is willing to embrace or tolerate.

So what will the SEC do?

I don't believe the SEC will want to give the appearance of the Big Ten and Pac-12 (but mostly the Big Ten) dictating what it does on its own so there was never going to be a domino effect of one conference right after another falling in line.

The SEC's measured approach of pushing the season back by a month seems like a very good call in hindsight. The Big Ten backed itself into a corner in deciding that a final choice had to be made very quickly. Maybe the initial leak was a trial balloon meant to gauge public opinion but even media and fan outcry didn't deter presidents from the original cancelation choice. Perhaps the Big Ten believed that it had the clout to force the hand of every other league. Turns out, it did with the Pac-12 but not with other conferences.

The SEC has a couple of weeks to come up with an aggressive plan. And they had better be planning.

My personal opinion is the idea of bubbling the football players who are to participate anywhere will be pretty much necessary for a season to successfully take place. It's easy to imagine the SEC starting a season, or trying to, and then shutting things down quickly. Right or wrong, society doesn't have much tolerance for positive cases and we've seen plenty of course-changes upon bad news.

For a season to work, there has to be a plan to protect players from the massive numbers of regular student non-athletes who are descending on universities and making it much more difficult to protect athletes from the awful transmissibility of COVID-19.

I think they can justify making the effort. I like how the SEC has gone about it so far. I think the plan is genuinely, from the presidents' perspectives as a majority, to press ahead and brainstorm possibilities and plans. I'm skeptical of the season actually being completed and think the bubble needs to happen for us to watch Kentucky football in 2020.