At the end of a span of seven days of unusual tumult in the athletic history of the colleges, I walked back with a leading figure from the sector who offered this hefty quote to me last Saturday: ‘I remember’ the end of the week the autumn sport is postponed in all conferences. ”
He was right, with one exception of nine figures. All bankruptcy championships in the NCAA have been postponed except FBS football, which lost four conferences, but still has six others that inhabited an eroding football island.
The named source, who works in one of the Stubborn Six leagues still planning to play, was surprised at where we stand. “After the Big Ten and Pac-12 were canceled, I thought there would be a lot more pressure on us to pursue the matter.” Whatever the pressure, there has been opposition so far. But it is not easy, because some of the pressure is still coming from the gut of every decision maker.
That source, like the other two thousand college administrators, coaches or athletes I spoke to this week, sounded conflicting. Nobody is it wis what to do. There is no absolute conviction – not in procrastination and not in passing. Every decision is accompanied by a doubt to doubt about what the right thing is.
A short autumn season with almost no fans and no true national championship, in the midst of a pandemic with no vaccine? Yuck. A replacement spring season that may or may not happen with a vaccine that may or may not happen and can adversely affect following season? Yuck.
“We have no good options,” the source said.
And with that, everyone in college sports is wrong at the moment.
Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
Athletes are tired of the uncertainty, and the lack of concrete answers from their university leaders. One athletic director One Power 5 met with a group of athletes and said he could see the tension on their faces and hear it in their voices. (The mental health concerns are real, whether a season is played or not played.) A group of five AD apologized to his football team for the lack of leadership currently in college sports.
Coaches are frustrated, confused, angry, anxious and caught in the middle. The players below them want answers and get some good ones – and more than a few of them will be revealed with their unhappiness. The managers above them require strict team adherence to high health standards – to the extent that some head coaches spend more time maintaining interpersonal distance during practice than actual coaching. Many teams that went too far to reduce the spread of viruses have even canceled their seasons this week.
Campus and conference administrators are fed up of the endless Zoom calls and other meetings to discuss all the difficult aspects of college sports during a pandemic. One AD said he spent time at the end of each day sitting in the backyard and watching in the distance, a brief exposition of the computer screen and the pressure of trying to make the best decisions in the midst of bad circumstances.
These are all smart people, and the vast majority of them are also mean people. They just do not know with clarity what to do. Mental abduction is the urgent status update.
Anyone who says this is simple – to play or not to play – is an idiot like a liar or unable to think outside of their own little worldview. Do not be afraid is not a strategy for dealing with something that has killed more than 167,000 Americans and infected more than 5 million. Shut everything off is also not a realistic long-term answer.
That there should be some empathy for all those involved in college athletics. We have an average of more than 1,000 COVID-19 deaths per day in America at present – but almost none of them are young athletes. Many people without an interest in university sports can not believe that someone is trying to play at the moment – but many people on the inside really want to play. There are a lot of major problems in the world – but if you look at revenue tanks when you’re trying to run a $ 100 million operation, that’s a pretty big problem in your own world.
All that said, this has been a very abysmal achievement of the university athletics as a whole.
Many managers announced back in the spring that they had dozens of models for how to play a football season. Tellingly, they never went into detail about what these models were – maybe because it was a head boast. They wandered, made no decisions, did not focus on much of anything above hoping it would come out OK Hope is a sound strategy.
Scheduling one week off and canceling the next season was not a great idea. Coaches who said they would rely on medical experts, then ran and publicly lobbyed to “fight for their players” to play was inconsistent or disrespectful. (And also an obvious signal for recruits.) No one, at any level, was willing to put up numbers – percentages of positive tests, or whatever the metrics would be – that would be necessary for a team shutdown.
The lack of leadership goes to what should be the top, the NCAA, but that is not even the top in the case of big-time football. What part is the problem. Still, the NCAA on Thursday managed to get some information that some in the Stubborn Six conferences unfortunately saw as a means to pressure them not to play.
NCAA medical experts held a media appeal in which Dr. Carlos del Rio, an associate dean at Emory University in Atlanta, provided the amount of money: “I mean, I feel like the Titanic. We’ve hit the iceberg and we’re trying to decide what time we should play the band? ”
Starting Friday afternoon, the Stubborn Six band will play. They have made it this far, which is a surprise to some. How long they go, we do not know, but the next iceberg is dead ahead.
Full student agencies are currently reporting back on campuses nationwide.
More NCAA coverage from SI.com team sites:
‘What has changed?’: Iowa parents want answers from big ten
It’s time for structural reform in College Football
Michigan Adapts well to recruitment in the death period
.
