Amid college football’s starts and stops is one central question: Can it finish?

A calendar once beaming with handy open dates for conferences that started early has grown clogged just as a whole country has gone all red zone. Bob Bowlsby, the Big 12 commissioner, in an interview with SiriusXM Radio on Thursday, told of discussions of potential postponements for the College Football Playoff, set now for Jan. 1 and 11. Sankey said on his SEC teleconference Wednesday, “I’m not going to hypothesize about change, but I’m not inattentive to the potential that change may need to occur at a number of different levels.”

Administrators around the country, who have grown pretty much unshockable in dealing with all possibilities since pretty much springtime, have grown realistic as well.

“I think there’s no more jolts, per se,” Arkansas Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek said in a telephone interview, by which he meant that when everything is a jolt, nothing is a jolt. The Razorbacks actually will play Saturday — at Florida — but without their coach, Sam Pittman, who tested positive.

“We haven’t lost any conference games yet; we’ve had to reschedule,” American Athletic Conference Commissioner Mike Aresco said in a telephone interview. “But, you know, we’re running out of real estate. It’s late in the year now; we’ve done reasonably well — probably better than we expected — but it’s getting late in the year.” Even for a conference that has seen a lighter brunt — two conference games pushed to December, two Navy games still to be determined — “I don’t take anything for granted, and the last thing we could be is smug about anything.” Administrators have known for a while, he said, that some teams might not finish.

“We keep waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Yurachek said, “and every time you think you see it, you kind of start going back up the hill, and that’s where we are right now.” He said the athletic directors “kind of wrap our arms around each other” in meetings on video — and he speaks for an athletic department that has held 40 sporting events in 10 sports this fall, with none postponed or canceled.

“It’s just time to lead and shut it down,” said Brian Castrucci, a football fan and the president of the de Beaumont Foundation of Bethesda, Md., a 22-year-old organization that aims to strengthen public health nationwide. He added: “I’m a huge ACC fan. I’m a huge N.C. State fan. I love the sport. I understand the challenges with brain injuries, and I get all the struggle with that. This is just a bad idea.”

Will the season make it?

“I think we will,” Aresco said. “We’ll be able to finish. I’m cautiously optimistic” while “definitely on edge” looking around.

“We’ll make it there,” said Yurachek, who defined “there” as holding a conference championship game Dec. 19. “Now, I can’t tell you for certain that all 14 teams will have played 10 games” as originally scheduled.

“I think the only way they can do it,” Castrucci said, “is if they stopped it now and said, ‘Listen, we’re going to do a four-team playoff, like the NBA teams, and we’re just going to have a bubble.’ ” As a follower of the sport, he zings that everyone knows it will be Clemson, Alabama, Ohio State and somebody else anyway. “But, no, I do not think we’re going to get to the classic [conference] championship games, followed by the playoff. And I cannot imagine that we’re going to have a bowl season.”

He daydreams: “If Nick Saban shut down the program [for the season], that would be amazing. That’s the game-changer we need.”

Castrucci has watched both from afar and in dismay at recent games that saw “hundred-percent violations of public-health policy.” He watched Notre Dame students storm the field after a double-overtime win over No. 1 Clemson (and wisecracked that a win over virus-depleted Clemson lacking Trevor Lawrence hardly rates a field-storming). He watched Florida Coach Dan Mullen, the 2020 national coaching leader in pandemic incompetence, edge up onto the stands in Jacksonville last Saturday to celebrate with fans a win over Georgia.

“I can’t, as a public-health expert, I can’t compete with that” in the area of messaging, Castrucci said. “We can’t continue to tell people that covid is a serious problem and have college football just power through it. It is contradictory messaging. … It doesn’t help the nation. It doesn’t help people who are not wearing masks and believe that covid is a hoax.”

He repeatedly refers to another November, to Magic Johnson’s announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. That moment brought a realization previously understood only in the gay community, mingling a pandemic and a familiar face, someone people at least thought they knew. He acknowledges college football has not had that moment — a star hospitalized or on a ventilator — and that he hopes it never does.

“What breaks my heart,” Castrucci said, “is that [Ohio State quarterback] Justin Fields can get 250,000 people to sign a petition [to play football] and I can’t get people to wear a mask.” It’s a “tragedy,” he said, that “everybody knows who Justin Fields is, [but] nobody knows who Mysheika Roberts is. Who is Mysheika Roberts? She’s the health commissioner of Columbus.”

Within college athletics, the belief resonates that even as things worsen all around, it’s preferable to keep the teams sequestered. Aresco and his staff have spotted open dates, when players disperse, as most troublesome. He cites the studies showing no evidence of transmission on the field during play. Said Washington State Coach Nick Rolovich: “What we’re all missing is the human element of contact. I’m happy that these guys get to get it — in meetings, in games — more than the rest of the country.”

Still, within these ecosystems, it’s exhausting. Aresco sometimes forgets to eat as he spends all day on coronavirus video meetings, including at least twice weekly with the conference medical task force in “intense discussions — extremely, extremely complicated.” Yurachek wakes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with that familiar bale of nerves as he checks his phone for the testing results.

“I feel closer to an MD,” he said, “than an AD.”