There are articles all over the internet talking about how air travel will never be the same. Having to get to the airport four hours early for things like temperature scans, immunity passports, and walking through disinfection tunnels, along with temperature checks again after landing and articles all mention that while it sounds crazy, so did taking off shoes prior to 9/11.

This affects everything about travel, like companies cutting back on travel, and people choosing to drive instead of fly in the first place. Like for instance, college students at Utah State or Weber State whose original home is Las Vegas, students at BYU who are from Boise, or students who attend college somewhere in Southern California while being from Northern California or vice versa, that now fly when they go home, may opt to just drive home depending on how long it takes to fly instead of drive with how much time is tacked on the flight time for sanitation as well as how long they are stuck at the airport when they land for another check.

This would also affect every sport except football cause football charters, so chartering everywhere could be the way around it and almost what you have to do depending on the new realities of flying commercial, kind of like it got to a point where we and others felt like we HAD TO pay athletes the cost of attendance cause other schools were doing it. But this could even affect football as well as basketball and other teams that DO get to charter everywhere depending on what new rules with sanitizing and health checks the FAA comes out with even for chartering.

Scheduling is one thing that could get affected. If it becomes enough of nightmare to fly commercial, teams may opt to just play opponents they can bus to, and maybe more teams like even us will more often have conference play be the first time they get on an airplane. For instance, Idaho State has preferred to not play us every year and instead schedule teams in Colorado or California, but the new way of traveling could cause them to lean towards playing us cause of it being an easy bus ride for them. And teams like UC Irvine for instance may learn towards not playing us again(or anywhere else they have to fly to) and instead playing OOC games against schools in California they can bus to. While even schools as close as Montana, Southern Utah and Montana State may lean towards playing us cause they can bus here. And in the midwest and east, there are several schools that are bus rides away from each other, and some schools are even in the same city or metro area and can travel across town.

For those teams that still schedule OOC games they have to fly to, more teams than already do may try to get two games out of a trip, so they can bus from their first opponent to their second one, and not schedule one team unless they find a second taker a short bus ride away. And more teams that do play guarantee games out of necessity might raise the price cause of choosing to charter to games, both the money games and needing the money to charter to conference games they have to fly to(and again, depending on new FAA rules, even charter travel could become a nightmare). We would criticize Stew for refusing to play guarantee games, but that wasn't cause of us needing the money and more other factors that were beaten to death in threads talking about it, but if we decide we need money to charter everywhere, maybe one or two games a year against a big school could start happening.

And maybe we for instance, if it got a point of having to be at the airport four hours early, may be better off just busing to Las Vegas instead of flying.

One thing you would hope, as much as we have already wished the Mountain West would do this, was start scheduling so teams get to, on one road trip, play at Fresno and San Jose; us and Boise, UNLV and San Diego; two of Colorado State, Wyoming, and Air Force, as opposed to these one at home one on the road weeks.

It has been a good system in women's soccer where teams play us on Sunday afternoon, then bus to the airport and go home right after the game, while our girls as well do that with their road games, but that is another thing that may not be possible with the requirement to get to the airport four hours early.

And the dilemma of health checks being required to board planes for road games. Everyone who ever plays division 1 basketball will have heard the story of Michael Jordan playing when he is sick and think that they can if he can, but the FAA allowing boarding will be a different story. Teams already can be different teams when players can get injured or discipline problems, but imagine another scenario where teams are sometimes different cause of missing a player for a road game cause of failing an airport health check. Spencer Nelson for instance played through sickness alot his senior year, and would have failed health checks back then. You could for instance have UNLV go to a tournament or two game road trip, have their best player fail a health check and have to play without him, lose to a few crappy teams, then have that star player back for conference play. Of course, the opposite could happen with UNLV getting a big win against a Power 5 team from back east that has one of their starters fail the airport health check, then gets him back for their respective conference games.

Assistant coaches may as well have to step up with the potential of one of them having to stay home from a road trip.

We could also see a scenario where a starter is borderline on passing an airport temperature check, and we have the San Jose State home game on Wednesday(which we can win without him) followed by a road game on Saturday, so just to be safe, we sit the player on Wednesday and really, don't even "sit" him, have him stay home and not come to the arena at all just to make sure he passes the airport check on Friday. That leads to a story in itself that players with any symptoms won't even be at the arena at all in the future, just as every type of place will ask people with symptoms to stay home.

Alot of our team got sick in Cancun one year, so imagine other teams in those tournaments getting sick and stuck there getting home late, affecting their routine for even home games. Along with missing more class than they otherwise would. It's pretty likely as sick as our football team was when we went to the Arizona Bowl, alot of them would have been stuck in Tucson longer cause of failing health checks and not getting to go their original home or Logan.

You could also hope the NCAA starts allowing teams to participate in more than one tournament a year with teams not wanting to fly the new way, and just wanting to go through the airport and board a plane once for a few games rather than two or three times for two or three games.

And finally, if we do resort to letting the men charter to every single game, it would be alot harder to justify not letting the women and every olympic sport do it.