COVID-19 may have decided the outcome of the first college football game of 2020

College football is about to gain steam.

Nine FBS football games will be played this weekend.

The ACC and Big 12 will open next weekend.

The SEC will join the party two weeks later.

But one game has already happened: Austin Peay took on Central Arkansas in a top-25 FCS matchup Saturday night, in the first football game of the COVID era.

Austin Peay came into the game without All-American wide receiver DeAngelo Wilson, who put up over 1,600 yards and 15 touchdowns in 2019.

Without him, the Governors completed less than half of their passes and didn’t reach the 200-yard passing mark.

Austin Peay didn’t have star 5-foot-9 defensive tackle Josephus Smith, who notched 7.5 sacks and 18.5 tackles for loss in 2019 on his way to all-conference honors. A handful of other defensive linemen stayed home as well.

Without them, the Governors allowed 177 rushing yards on 5.7 yards per attempt.

Austin Peay left all three of the long snappers on its roster at home and played a linebacker instead. The linebacker bounced two snaps to the punter and sent a third over his head.

The final seven punts for the Governors were pooch punts from quarterback Jeremiah Oatsvall.

Multiple other starters missed the game for Austin Peay, too.

It was chaos.

Here’s the thing though: We don’t know why anybody missed the game. It’s be easy to assume that one of the long snappers caught the virus and then spread it to the rest of the group during meetings or practice. Maybe it didn’t even spread but due to “close contact” rules, the others still weren’t allowed to play.

Or, maybe all of the long snappers just happened to tweak their ankles this week.

Austin Peay representatives have refused to say which of the players missed the game due to COVID-19 and which players missed the game due to more standard football injuries because of medical privacy policies.

What we do know is this: There were reports before the game that a significant number of Austin Peay players either had COVID-19 or had come into close contact with somebody who had contracted the disease and was therefore left off the 70-man travel roster.

Despite missing a significant number of players for whatever reason, Austin Peay scored a touchdown to take a one-point lead with just over 90 seconds remaining in the game. Then, Central Arkansas flew down the field and the Governors lost.

It was a close game.

With four or five more starters available, more depth pieces available to replace those missing and the ability to punt the ball instead of gifting the opposition a win in the field position game, would the Governors have lef the FCS Kickoff with a win?

It’s impossible to say but it’d be easy to make the argument that COVID-19 flipped the outcome of the first college football game of the season.

The question now is whether COVID wiping out entire position groups will be an outlier or the new norm. Just imagine what Saturday would have looked like if none of the quarterbacks were available instead of the long snappers.

During his Sunday press conference, Auburn head coach Gus Malzahn said that his team had to stop practicing last Tuesday because a COVID outbreak left the team without enough available players. Malzahn expects 16 players to be unavailable this week.

Luckily, Auburn doesn’t play its first game until Sept. 26.

But what happens if one of the 18 teams scheduled to play this weekend finds itself in similar circumstances?