ACC Commissioner John Swofford offered a strong sign of hope for college football fans on Thursday, saying the league is anticipating a fall 2020 athletic season.

After the ACC Spring Meetings — which were held virtually due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak — Swofford took time to answer questions from the media about the situation surrounding the fall season.

“There just aren’t a lot of answers at this given point in time,” Swofford said, “and to get to the answers, you have to identify the questions and identifying the question, some of them are obvious and easy, but they also lead to other questions. I’ve been in this a long time and I’ve never been in a more challenging situation.”

https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1261015644658642944?s=20

The ACC and NCAA canceled spring athletics earlier this year in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Although certain college campuses like UNC are anticipating a return of students for the fall semester, Swofford acknowledged that the situation is fluid.

“We’ll have four different scenarios financially as we move forward, possibly more, that are related to playing. (They range from) a normal football season to playing an abbreviated football season to not playing football but playing basketball to not playing sports for a year. I certainly don’t anticipate that happening, but you do have to take a look at the extreme of the circumstances we’re looking at.”

While schools like UNC have indicated they plan to open, Swofford also said that the league is unsure if each school will begin fall sports at the same time. Much of this will be determined by if individual states reopen or continue to restrict activities.

Despite losing the NCAA basketball tournaments and the majority of the spring season, the ACC was able to distribute 98 percent of the money it was budgeted to distribute to each member school. Swofford said this was due to a lower overhead with no travel for conference officials and better-than-expected first-year revenue from the ACC Network.

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