Why the 2020 college football championship Saturday will be strikingly different

The Big Ten’s highly unusual 2020 season kicks off this weekend. It will end nine weeks later with a brand-new concept that could help turn Dec. 18-19 into the most compelling championship weekend college football has ever seen — including one of the most crowded football Saturdays in recent memory.

All it took was a pandemic, Jim Harbaugh’s imagination and the specific wording in a federal statute from 1961.