Kevin Warren was incredibly honest when he joined Big Ten Network’s Mike Hall on Thursday afternoon. Shortly after the B1G announced it will have a conference-only schedule for fall sports during the 2020-21 academic year, the league’s commissioner talked about the decision.

But the choice to eliminate nonconference competitions does not mean that we’re guaranteed to have sports this year. In fact, Warren says he’s very concerned about the outlook of having athletics resume this year.

“We may not have sports in the fall,” Warren said candidly. “We may not have a college football season in the B1G.”

Those aren’t optimistic words from a conference commissioner, not when the college football season is rapidly approaching. We’re less than two months away from when the first kickoff of the season was scheduled — although a new start date will likely be determined in the near future.

Making the decision to cut out nonconference games from the schedule was a necessary move. Warren described it as a “logical first step” to ensuring that sports return this fall. And while some have criticized the move of coming too early, the B1G commissioner says it was the right thing to do.

“We made a vow early on that, first and foremost, we would put the health, the safety and the wellness of our student-athletes at the center of all of our decisions,” Warren said.

We’ll see what happens in the coming days and weeks, but there’s not a lot of optimism right now.