All sports lose something during the pandemic. No sport loses more than college football.

The coronavirus pandemic is here, and we have zero idea when it’s going away. To various degrees and with varying success, sports are marching forward. All lose something. None loses more than college football. It is fractured by the fact that some schools are playing and some are not, which brings into question the legitimacy of everything from the Heisman Trophy winner to the national champion. But put those debates aside. The sport is also diminished to the point where it may be unrecognizable.

The version of football played by thousands of college kids scattered across hundreds of schools can’t reach the level of the NFL, a league in which every athlete is elite, every roster spot is earned and ever player is paid. They’re the best, and that’s undeniable. But it’s also true that the college version of the game is tons more fun — not because of the players or the plays, but because of every single ancillary element.

The bands are peppier. The tailgates are more elaborate. The traditions run deeper. The accents are thicker. The overtimes go on forever. The towns are completely consumed. On fall Saturdays, State College goes from the 13th most populous city in Pennsylvania to the third. In Athens, Ga., life stops for the Bulldogs. In Atlanta, life goes on with the Falcons.

Even from the couch, entire Saturdays are eaten alive, from eggs and bacon through sausages and chili past cake and ice cream, with each region rising and pulling on its maize and blue, its burnt orange, its crimson and white. Colors matter. “GameDay” starts at 9 a.m. The Big Ten kicks off at noon. The midafternoon SEC game takes you through dinner. Prime time might bring you one Death Valley (Clemson) or another (LSU), and you’ll know immediately if it’s the latter because the numbers will be painted every five yards. Who’s to say in all of that that the Mountain West game airing on ESPN8 might not be the most compelling? And when those games end, what you’re left with is #Pac12AfterDark, which often as not ends up as the wildest shootout of the day.

Put down the remote for a second. Regardless of the school or the conference or the region, there is no American sport in which fans play a more central role than college football. The NFL is king — in the ratings, in the national consciousness, in Vegas. But not in the stadiums. What would the best NFL game-day experiences be? Likely Lambeau Field in Green Bay for the history, followed by maybe CenturyLink Field in Seattle for the 12s and the elements and maybe AT&T Stadium outside Dallas for the sheer audacity of it all. Whatever the choice, the difference between, say, Nos. 5 and 32 isn’t all that great.

You could argue every single environment in the SEC is better than any of those environments in the NFL. (Well, maybe not Vanderbilt. Sorry, Vanderbilt.) The Swamp of Florida? Between the Hedges at Georgia? The Grove of Mississippi? Rocky Top of Tennessee? Check, check, check and check.

Strip away the fantasy element from the NFL, and who needs the RedZone channel? What you’re left with is the highest level of football that, even on Sundays with fans in the stands, can feel decidedly sterile, antiseptic. (Which, come to think of it, is something we need all of football to be this year.)

College football gets the gambling action, too. But college football doesn’t need the gambling action. It comes with both pomp and circumstance already built in. Unless a pandemic strips them away.

The Naval Academy, for instance, hosted a season opener Monday in Annapolis. The Midshipmen got destroyed by BYU, 55-3. Navy lacked both offense and defense but also something more fundamental to the experience at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium: the Brigade of Midshipmen.

Navy wanted some midshipmen in the stands. State and local ordinances prevent gatherings of such a size, which seems smart. But take away the brigade, and is a Navy football game really a Navy football game?

So it will be around the country, a sport defined by its pageantry (and its massive unpaid labor force) stripped down to first and 10 or third and long. The lights will be completely off in Columbus and Ann Arbor, Eugene and Tucson, because the Big Ten and Pac-12 aren’t playing this fall. Those conferences’ decisions stripped Notre Dame, fiercely independent in football for forever, of traditional opponents USC and Stanford, as well as a 2020 date with Wisconsin. So the Fighting Irish will play in the ACC, as sure an indication as any that an entire sport is contorting itself in an attempt to wedge in a season between virus outbreaks, traditions be damned.

For the Irish’s first game, against Duke, Notre Dame Stadium will be limited to 20 percent capacity. Fans will be limited to students, faculty and staff. Everyone will be physically distanced and required to wear masks. At Florida State’s Doak Campbell Stadium, which normally seats 82,500, only 19,500 fans will be allowed in, the band will be a fraction of its normal self, cheerleaders won’t be allowed on the field, and there won’t be a “Legacy Walk,” in which fans line the route from the team buses into the stadium.

And so on, and so on, across the country.

For so many fans, any fall Saturday starts when Lee Corso, the former coach and longtime ESPN analyst, chooses the winner of the game of the day by putting on the head of the mascot for the team he’s choosing. The “GameDay” crew is a fall touchstone. Fans clamor behind the set in hopes of being seen, booing positive assessments of the visiting team, scrawling odd signs and wearing strange costumes. You get that in Madison and Tuscaloosa on Saturdays, not Minneapolis or Tampa on Sundays.

On Saturday, Corso will pull on the head of either a Tiger or a Demon Deacon (care to wager which?) not in Winston-Salem, but at his Florida home. Any reaction will be generated by a few hundred contest winners from across the country, beamed in remotely. That’s Canned GameDay.

“To me, the best part of ‘College GameDay’ is the interaction with the fans, no matter where we are,” analyst Kirk Herbstreit said in a video he posted to social media. “We’ll try to bring you as close as you can, as we normally would.”

The glory of college football is wrapped up in its oddities and traditions, in having seven games on simultaneously with even odds that any could be the weirdest. College football has third and 47s. The NFL does not. But you can see third and 47 as part of a colorful tapestry, or you can view it as incompetent football. This year, with a less colorful tapestry, it seems more likely to be the latter.