The 2020 college football season faces many obstacles and unknowns as conference commissioners and athletic directors around the country consider how to proceed with fall sports amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 have already moved to a conference-only format. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey will wait until late July to decide on scheduling, but the league’s non-conference games (including rivalries against ACC schools) could be canceled as well.

Those concerns, however, are secondary for Florida athletics director Scott Stricklin. His top priority is trying to figure out how the Gators can even make it to the season.

“We need to find a path that allows us to put our athletes in a safe environment to compete,” Stricklin said Tuesday. “Once we figure out what that path looks like, coming up with the circumstances of who's on the schedule and when you're playing becomes a lot easier. To me, that's a downhill problem to have to solve.

“That's secondary to the challenge of trying to find testing protocols that people can feel good about and actually execute. And being able to make sure the team is traveling, how they get on a bus, and then a plane with a small group of people and get to a hotel and stay the night and show up the next day without having some kind of fear of infection that could spread.”

UF has administered 238 total tests across all sports as of this week, with 29 positive results for COVID-19. Stricklin said 50 tests were given to athletes who were exposed and/or exhibited symptoms after returning to campus, and 26 of those tests came back positive.

The most players who’ve been quarantined at one time is 12, Stricklin added. He knows the feeling.

“Last month, I actually tested positive myself for COVID,” Stricklin said. “Fortunately had mild symptoms and was able in a couple of days to kind of go back to normal.

“I thought I was being careful, but obviously this is a highly transmittable disease. So I do think it speaks to the importance of all of us doing our part and wearing the masks and physical distancing.”

The challenge of quarantining players has become evident since voluntary workouts started in June, but their return to campus has also taught Stricklin and his staff how to deal with positive tests. He noted that the idea of a single athlete testing positive caused the SEC Basketball Tournament to shut down.

“So we’ve advanced from March to June as far as how we manage that and how we look at that,” Stricklin said.

During a Zoom call last week with Florida football’s leadership committee, Stricklin emphasized to the group that their health and well-being takes precedence over everything else. Regardless of the financial implications, players will not be put in harm’s way.

“I told them to make sure you guys understand the No. 1 priority for when we are able to begin having games again, is the health of our athletes and our staff and our fans,” Stricklin said. “I wanted our players to hear that because I didn’t want them to see some of the stuff that’s out there on social media that may portray different priorities.

“I don't think we're going to put them in a situation where we're going to have bad optics. I think we're going to be careful enough. Really, that's our job. We want to win games and we want to create a great environment for 90,000 people to fill the Swamp in a normal situation. But our No. 1 job is to protect these student-athletes.”

If there is a season, Ben Hill Griffin Stadium will be at limited capacity. Stricklin’s staff has looked at several scenarios with the guidance of UF Health, and he expects to seat anywhere from 15,000 to 25,000 fans this fall.

“My guess is if you were looking at a strictly six-foot social distancing scenario with fans in the Swamp, you're looking at 15-20,000,” he said. “Maybe you can get close to 25,000 fans, but it's a much different number than what we're accustomed to.”

Florida’s schedule could look much different as well, with the potential of losing as many as four non-conference games. In a perfect world, Stricklin said the Power 5 conferences would make decisions “in concert” rather than what the Big Ten and Pac-12 did regarding their conference-only format.

To that end, Sankey, Stricklin and the other SEC ADs aren’t ready to determine who and when the league will play.

“I really think right now it's too early to make that determination,” Stricklin said. “When you start talking about what actual schedules could look like, there's so many unknowns that go into that right now that you're having to fill in the blanks on. It's hard to even make that jump.

“As soon as we feel like we can provide a competitive opportunity for our athletes in a safe manner, we want to do that. And I don’t know when that’s gonna be. ... If that’s September, great. If that’s a different month in the calendar that allows us to do it in this school year, I don’t think any of us are in a position to be choosy right now.”

Stricklin said he wants the Gators to play in-state Florida State if possible, and added that there hasn’t been any conversation about moving the Florida-Georgia game from Jacksonville to Gainesville or Athens, Ga.

"Our hope is to be able to play the game and to be able to play it in Jacksonville in some form," Stricklin said. "If we're able to get to the point where we play a game, when we get to that point I want to play that FSU game. That's really important to the state of Florida. I think it's really important to both institutions.

"I'm hopeful we can find a way to play our schedule as normally as possible at that point, but that again is secondary to making sure we take the extra steps to enhance the safety for our athletes."

Some positive news for UF is that no employees within the athletic department have been laid off, furloughed or taken pay cuts. And no matter what this fall brings, Stricklin is confident his program can weather the storm.

“We are going to get on the other side of this someday,” Stricklin said. “In 1918 Florida played one football game because of the Spanish Flu. And in 1942, we played 10 football games, but we kept losing players. If you look at the history, over the course of the year players kept leaving to go enlist and we kept losing games because our best players were going into the military to the point where the following year, in ’43, we did not have a team.

“We are in a period of disruption, but we’re not the first to ever have through this. We’re not even the first at the University of Florida to have gone through it. In both of those instances, we came back really strong.”