NORMAN, OK – SEPTEMBER 28: The Oklahoma Sooners take the field for the game against the Texas Tech Red Raiders at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on September 28, 2019 in Norman, Oklahoma. The Sooners defeated the Red Raiders 55-16. (Photo by Brett Deering / Getty Images)
Today, you may have heard that Oklahoma football is “pausing” the training season of the press season.
Head coach Lincoln Riley announced the move on Saturday along with the news that the players may go home for a few days before returning on Friday.
It’s the second part of this news that is the most challenging. The other news, although somewhat played out in the month of July due to a stellar COVID test record, is that one Faster player tested positive for the coronavirus this week.
The OU players underwent two rounds of testing this past week, with 205 players testing. The player who tested positive is currently in quarantine. It was the first time a Sooner player had tested positive for the coronavirus in five consecutive weeks, as of July 1st.
“With the opening game a week or two back, it only makes sense to spread our practices and give our boys some time away,” Riley said in a news release issued by the OU athletics department.
This comes less than 24 hours after the Mid-American Conference became the first FBS conference to cancel the fall football season.
Over the past few weeks, large numbers of players at the Pac-12 and Big Ten conferences have banded together and sent separate formal letters to their conference offices and the NCAA showing solidarity and expressing serious concerns about the plans that are in place. place to protect their health and safety amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The Missouri Valley Conference (of which Missouri State, Oklahoma’s season-opening opponent is a member) announced on Friday that it is moving its conference-only schedule to the spring, but non-conference games will fall to the discretion of its individual members. .
With the OU players allowed to return home, leaving the controlled environment effectively where they have been subjected to for the past five weeks, ii is not just a test to see how disciplined they can be in following recommended safety guidelines, but also states they pose a greater risk of exposure to COVID-19, knowingly or unknowingly.
The protocols and operating procedures that were in place at the time the Sooner players were on campus were exceptionally effective. Now everything effectively returns to square one, with the players being allowed to go home for a while.
It will be very interesting to see how the initial round of COVID testing finally goes next week about their return.
“We are aware of all the conversations across the country over the 2020 season,” Riley said. “The added benefit of temporarily canceling training camp is that it gives us a few more days to monitor those calls.”
All of this can be in vain anyway, as it appears more and more as the dominoes gain momentum and turn in a direction that leaves the Power Five leagues as the last bastion of defense in maintaining a fall college. football season.
And no conference wants to be the last to come up with this ever-changing crisis.
We all want to play football in the fall – some would force their sensible lives to depend on it after half a year of close isolation from normal daily activity – the fans want it, the players really want it and the schools are desperate for some sort of income stream.
But will it really be possible, or even practical, with all the health and safety barriers that there are to overcome and the high risk that we will ask the players and football staff to take on, given the storm warnings we have all are under?
A simple plus-minus analysis paints a fairly clear picture. It’s not the image we want to see, but it’s the reality we’re treated. College football needs to counter the facts and be sensible about all of this.
And above all else, the forces that need to be answered must answer the question: what is really gained by forcing a round pin into a square hole and moving forward with a short fall season that is likely to have more interruptions along the way, while the players at increasing risk as the season goes on?
At the end of the day, what would we really pull out: a trophy from a champion or a trophy for survival?
