IN 2014, coach June Jones’ off-the-wall suggestion of a college football season in the spring raised some eyebrows, but not a whole lot more.

That’s just June being June, people said, forgetting that he has often been ahead of his time in matters of football.

Spring football, it was thought, was just for, well, spring practice and fringe pro leagues that never seemed to stick around very long.

But six years later the concept of playing a whole intercollegiate season of football in the spring is getting a wider, more urgent look amid the pandemic.

The more COVID-19 spikes and hospitals fill up, the more college officials are finding it necessary to ask themselves, “Well, what if…?”

Rather than face a truncated fall season or a schedule riddled with pukas, more administrators and coaches are seeing it as a possible, if not likely, alternative.

While most college leagues have put it off to the side in July as a “Plan B” or “Plan C” option down the road, some are hoping to get out in front of things and consider embracing it now.

The Ivy League is scheduled to announce its plan for the 2020 season today and the possibility of a shift to the spring for 2021 is said to be among the options. If the Ivy League makes the move some others inside the Football Championship Subdivision are likely to follow.

>> RELATED: Ivy League suspends fall sports due to coronavirus pandemic

The Power 5 conferences and less well-heeled Group of 5 that make up the 130-member Football Bowl Subdivision wound likely wait longer to see how the pandemic cases trend before embracing the idea of spring football. But be assured they are taking notes.

Last week Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley told the media Zoom session, “I think the people who say it (spring football) is not (an option), in my opinion, just don’t want to think about it. I just think it would be wrong of us to take any potential option off the table right now. I think it’d be very difficult to say the spring is not a potential option. I, for one, think it’s very doable.”

Jones’ inspiration for spring football came from years spent in the USFL (1982-85). It was less about a medical situation and more about schools’ financial survival coming as it did in a time before terms such as “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” were in common use.

As the financial gap between the Power 5 conferences and the Group of 5 widened and the latter got fewer and fewer table scraps the table scraps for their of TV deals, Jones saw a need for radical change.

He envisioned better deals for conferences such as the Mountain West, where the University of Hawaii competes, and the American Athletic Conference, where he coached Southern Methodist at the time, by going to the spring where they wouldn’t be head-to-head with the marquee schools and could carve their own niche with networks looking for inventory.

“I think the have-nots should go ahead and move to the spring just like the USFL did. I think that there’s an opportunity to do a complete other side of that division,” Jones told WDAE, a Tampa, Fla., radio station in July 2014. “And, I think that if we don’t think that way as a group of have-nots, we’re going to get left behind,” Jones said.

The driving force has changed, but maybe Jones’ ability to see something nobody else was looking at hasn’t.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.