Every Big Ten athletic director wanted a fall 2020 season football college, told Nebraska’s Bill Moos Sam McKewon of the Omaha World Herald. In a column published by McKewon on Saturday, Moos said he and several of his fellow athletic directors – Gene Smith, Ohio State, Sandy Barbour of Penn State and Warde Manuel of Michigan – ran hard for the fall, while the Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren preferred this spring.
“(Warren) knew where we were coming from, and he was the messenger for the presidents and chancellors,” Moos said, according to McKewon, who wrote that Moos noted that “there was unanimous agreement” during every conference directors of athletics for holding a season in the fall.
Moos admitted that a Zoom meeting between all parties did not take place. In addition, Smith and Barry Alvarez of Wisconsin were not involved in “important discussions that shaped the league’s decisions,” Moos said, per McKewon. Warren was present at the meeting on behalf of the athletic directors.
“I knew where our people stood, but I would have liked to have been in the room when they expressed it to the Commissioner and our presidents and chancellors,” Moos said. “The commissioner worked in silos, and the silos were not connected. And in the end, that ensured various degrees of communication that were not delivered.”
Ohio State and Nebraska made headlines as head football coaches Ryan Day and Scott Frost made public appearances for a fall season, even after the Big Ten’s postponement. Elders of players from both programs appeared later this week at the Big Ten headquarters in Rosemont, Illinois, and protested the conference’s decision.
“Our goal is to get something back by Monday afternoon, but every now and then we haven’t heard anything,” Glen Snodgrass, the father of newcomer Garrett Snodgrass, Nebraska, said Saturday. “I know we as a parent group of the university feel that the football team here at the University of Nebraska is a very safe place to be. We feel like the measures they have in place, the experts who they have, the tests they have, go above and beyond even what has been handed down to them from higher up.We feel like we are with that football team, and being an active member of that team is safer than not being a part of it. “This week a lot of the kids are not involved in the football program, and I’m just a little worried about what’s going on without that structure of what they’re part of the football team.”
The Big Ten hopes to play a spring season, but details have not been revealed by the conference, leaving all parties – coaches, parents and players – with lingering questions. Sources told 247Sports’ Jeff Rabjohns and Brian Snow that the Big Ten will begin a possible January with games in domes.
