After weeks of speculation and nervous handwringing, the Big Ten Conference finally took yet another step closer toward a 2020 football season on Wednesday.

The conference officially announced its full regular-season schedule, with 10 league games tentatively to played over a span of 12 weeks from the weekend of Sept. 5 through Nov. 21 to align with academic calendars. The Big Ten Championship game in Indianapolis is set for Dec. 5, two weeks after the end of the regular season.

Teams will be allowed to start fall camps on Friday, Aug. 7, as originally planned.

However, as Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren stressed during his interview on the Big Ten Network on Wednesday morning, flexibility was the hallmark of how the schedule was assembled.

Each team will have two bye weeks and there are up to four weeks of built-in flexible scheduling after the original 12-week season is set to end. All teams will play six divisional games and four non-divisional games, and one crossover game was added to each team’s schedule.

“What went into the decision (on the schedule) was to afford us the best possible opportunity to be as flexible as we possibly can,” Warren said on BTN. “That was one of the reasons why when we decided to go to a 10-game Big Ten-only schedule, we were hopeful that this builds us an opportunity to remain as flexible as we possibly can.”

Warren said the league is prepared to adapt to the current COVID-19 situation and the setbacks that could result from it by potentially moving the start of the season back one or even two weeks because of the open dates built into the schedule through the year at the end of the season.

“This is not a straight line this year,” Warren said. “We released the schedule, but we’ve done it in a context of we have to plan ahead, but we understand that we are in a pandemic… As I sit here today, I’m confident that we have done everything that we possibly can up to this moment to feel comfortable to move to tomorrow. This is a day-to-day situation.”

The conference also announced its medical policies concerning testing requirements, quarantines, and positive case isolation. Schools will use a third-party laboratory to ensure testing consistency across the league, and protocols will be adjusted as necessary depending on how the coronavirus situation progresses this fall.

Warren said individual schools would manage their own testing through fall practices, and then the Big Ten would work in conjunction with the teams once the season starts. The Big Ten also announced that testing frequency for “high risk” sports – including football – would be a minimum of two polymerase chain reaction (PCR) surveillance tests per week during the season.

Participation in fall sports will be optional for all student-athletes, and scholarships will continue to be honored for players who decide to opt-out of competition for the 2020-21 academic year due to COVID-19 concerns.

“Testing is a critical component,” Warren said. “It doesn’t solve all the issues, but our goal is to make sure that if we are so blessed to be able to compete this fall in the Big Ten, that our student-athletes will not only be healthy and safe during the week, but also as we enter into competition.”

While Wednesday marked an extremely important step toward a Big Ten football season being realized this fall, Warren reiterated several times that this was by no means an assurance that a full season would happen.

“I feel comfortable as we sit here today,” Warren said, “but it’s a fluid situation. There’s no guarantee that we will have fall sports or a football season, but we’re doing everything that we possibly can that if we’re so blessed to be able to have fall sports, that things are organized and done in a very methodical and professional manner…

“It would be purely speculation for me to sit here today and say, ‘this is what percent I think we’ll have a season.’ I know from my standpoint I’m taking this entire process and entire journey on a day-to-day basis. I’m staying focused, I’m staying prayerful to do the right things, and I look forward to the day to hopefully be able to turn around and say that we did everything we could in the Big Ten to keep our student-athletes healthy and safe, both physically and mentally, during this journey.”