From Rivals affiliate Yahoo Sports' Pete Thamel:
The return of college football season officially took a giant step forward on Thursday.
The NCAA Football Oversight Committee passed a recommendation that coaches can begin formally working with their teams on July 13, sources told Yahoo Sports. The committee essentially laid out the practice guidelines to allow players to return safely prior to the traditional four-week football training camp.
The committee’s recommendation still needs to be approved by the NCAA Division I Council, but that step is expected to be a formality. The NCAA Division I Council meets next week and will vote on this on June 17.
Here’s the schedule as laid out by the Football Oversight Committee. Schools can begin to have access to their players on July 13, which would include strength workouts and coaches engaging in film study with their players. (It would be a week earlier for teams involved in Week 0, as they’ve been told they can start July 6.) According to the language discussed on the football oversight call, summer access “may begin 25 calendar days prior to the first permissible preseason practice date.”
Those eight-hour weeks would transition to a pair of 20-hour weeks on July 24, which have been added in part as a safety measure to help get players physically prepared for the season. These have been discussed by the group as being comparable to NFL OTAs, as they’d include walkthroughs and a ball.
This would lead to the training camp starting date on Aug. 7.
The NCAA granted schools the ability to hold so-called voluntary workouts with their players on June 1. This came after the NCAA lifted the moratorium on athletic activities.
