Fans of both Alabama and Florida State football will gather at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee on Aug. 30 for the season-opening clash between the schools having not seen what their teams look like in an April spring game.
Neither will conduct A-Day, or the Garnet & Gold Game, as the Seminoles call it, with the game-like simulation fans are accustomed to. And a lot of Alabama fans traveling to Tuscaloosa for A-Day 2025 — in numbers that will be intriguing to estimate — are going to swallow the disappointment like bad-tasting medicine.
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They aren’t the only ones.
Let’s take the spring-game cancellation tour: Texas, LSU, Nebraska, Auburn, Southern Cal, Missouri, Michigan State, North Carolina State, Oklahoma, North Carolina and West Virginia are shelving it too, at least for 2025. And that’s just a list of schools that, along with Alabama and FSU, have at least been up front with fans about what to expect. You can bet fans on at least a few other campuses will be expecting a game, and won’t get it. Some are couching the rug pull with branding changes like “spring showcase,” but that’s just code for “we’re not keeping score.”
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So is college football trending toward a widespread discontinuation of spring games?
One year on this topic makes for a strong data point, but not a trend; let’s see what happens next year before we presume a pattern. But the sheer number of schools dumping 2025 spring games is alarming, to say the least, for the fans who love them. When all the spring dust settles — on some campuses, fans will surely get a practice/game hybrid — I’d expect more than a quarter of all Power Four programs will have either canceled their spring games or, at a minimum, dumbed them down.
If there’s any sign that 2025 is just a blip on the radar, it’s that the reasons cited for cancellations vary wildly across the board. At FSU, it’s stadium renovations, which is temporary ground to stand on. At Nebraska, coach Matt Ruhle cited an unwillingness help rivals decide which Huskers to pursue in the NCAA spring transfer portal, a 10-day period which happens to fall later this month. At Texas, coach Steve Sarkisian explained scrapping the Longhorns spring game by citing the general wear and tear of playing 16 games last year on the way to a national championship game appearance. But neither the Longhorns nor any other program will play that many games on a consistent basis. As to Southern Cal’s spring game cancellation, a Trojans source told ESPN: “The biggest purpose that a spring game actually serves now is a fan engagement tool, and we just think we can engage fans in a better way.”
Good luck with that.
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Sure, even spring games had their restrictions: typically, that’s meant no blitzing, no hits on the quarterback, and no full-contact on special teams plays. But even with those modifications, traditional spring games legitimately entertain. Practices don’t.
Last week, I wrote that Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer’s decision to hold a practice rather than a game was defensible, given injury-related depth concerns. But the full-fledged A-Day game, barring the same issue next year, needs to be back in 2026. And shame on other schools if they don’t do the same.
The sea change in college football has fans paying more for tickets, paying more for travel, paying more for everything.
They deserve better than to have their spring games reduced to backpedaling drills.
Tuscaloosa News sport columnist Chase Goodbread.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on X.com @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: On the future of Alabama’s A-Day game, and spring football everywhere
