The first Power 5 domino fell Tuesday afternoon.

The Big 10 is officially punting on football in the fall, postponing the season until at least the spring and it could have a ripple effect on other Power 5 conferences like the Pac-12.

Interestingly enough, South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner was doing a spot with 107.5 FM and spoke to if the Big 10’s decision could impact the SEC in any way.

“I don’t think it affects us a whole lot. Would love for all the A5 to be playing,” Tanner told Jay Phillips. “The last few days it had been going in that direction and hit a pause yesterday. Now that you shared that with me, that’s a decision they felt they needed to make and they’ll look forward to the spring.”

The Big 10 was the first of the major college football conferences—ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC—to announce its intent to postpone things until the start of 2021.

It speaks to each conference’s autonomy to do however it pleases and the Big 10’s decision could ultimately mean the Pac-12 and other conferences could soon follow.

Right now, though, it looks like the ACC and SEC are going to proceed as expected right now with the Big 12 still deciding. Tanner did say, though, that could change.

“I can only speak for myself and I’m not representing the Southeastern Conference, but I wish we were all aligned. But we’re in an 11-state footprint in the Southeastern Conference. You talk about the A4 outside of us and it’s a big country,” he said. “Maybe it’s not a perfect scenario. I like the alignment when it’s possible but maybe it’s not. You just have to deal with the circumstances.”

One of the biggest reasons the Big 10 opted to postpone things was player safety and other side effects from COVID-19 and some of the longer-lasting issues that stem from it.

There are studies mentioning heart issues after getting the Coronavirus and Tanner said the Gamecocks and the rest of the SEC schools know about those and those are part of daily discussions athletic directors, presidents and conference officials have.

“We take everything very, very seriously. You mentioned in the spring, is it going to be different in the spring? We hope sometime in the spring we are able to administer a vaccine but we don’t know the date of that,” Tanner said. “We say January 1 we’ll crank it back up again, that’s easy to say but it’s harder to say you’ll get there.”

The challenge then becomes for the Big 10 (and any other conference that postpones things) treading water until the spring sports season. That, depending on how the virus progresses this fall, could be another challenge.

“I think spring is a challenge, personally. It’s not impossible but I think it’s very difficult to go in that direction. That’s something they’re looking at. We’re approaching it from a different standpoint at this time. It could be something we address but it’s not where we’re looking right now.”