Big Ten Commissioner Reportedly Wants Spring Season
The Big Ten has an upcoming What The Hell Are We Doing call, and some news just prior to it:
Going into the call, the sources were told Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren preferred a spring football season, although no decision had been made.
The MAC has already canned the fall season and hopes to play in spring.
News that the commissioner of the Big Ten doesn't want to play this fall seems like a strong indicator that Big Ten football will not be played this fall. There is no content after the jump.
There is a clear delineation between organizations that have been able to lead through this crazy time and those that seem hell bent to stumble through it.
Does anybody think its feasible to play 2 seasons of football with like a 2 month break between full contact. I just don't see how that is possible
Imagine the implications that would have on recruiting, as well. There's too many complications that I see with a spring season to make it a feasible solution.
But I understand it's a financial decision to the higher-ups.
I agree there's some danger, but if they follow the fall schedule (including bowls) just in the spring, most teams would play from February until May, then a month off before a bowl game, then 2 months off before they'd start the following season. And for a lot of guys they're practicing and prepping anyway during that period.
I agree it's not great, but the other option is you cancel the 2020 season (which I wouldn't have a problem with either). And it's clear at this point people want some form of football this school year.
if they follow the fall schedule (including bowls) just in the spring, most teams would play from February until May
How in the hell is the B1G going to play games outdoors in February? I seriously do not see games being played in February & March.
Michigan lacrosse has played games in the big house in February and March for a few years, and recently in the dedicated lacrosse stadium without much issue.
I think Green Bay might have even played some home games in January at times...
spring football felt obvious to me for a while. If the spring has a higher probability of being safer (vaccine, some other advances), with maybe more revenue because you might be able to have some fans, I don’t see the downside.
I mean, NFL teams play games in January and February, sometimes in very cold areas. Yeah, it's not optimal but if they want a full season (even a conference slate), they need to set aside about 3 months. Maybe they start the end of February, but that's just how the calendar works out.
August 8th, 2020 at 10:08 PM ^
Michigan and MSU should use Ford Field. There aren't going to be fans anyway.
Or there are no bowl games just the CFB playoff games
Yeah, that would be the other option but I have a hard time believing the leagues (and their TV partners) want to limit the revenue options to just the 3 CFB playoff games. I could see a bunch of the smaller-tier bowls disappearing just out of financial necessity, but honestly I'm not sure.
You could also delay the start of next season til October and play fewer non conference games and get rid of the month off between regular season and bowl games. So instead of two months off, they get three. Or just start later and end later (October - February). Then 2022 season would be back to normal schedule
None of this is surprising. And honestly, I think starting in February might be a bit ambitious in terms of treatment options, but it makes more sense than trying to jam in a hodge-podge season in a couple of weeks.
August 9th, 2020 at 12:02 PM ^
Honestly, here it is, August 9th..... normally at this time of year my productivity at work has started to drop to near zero as I get constantly distracted between frequent trips to MGO and discussions with friends new and old in anticipation of the first game
Can any of you really say you were even excited for the season?
I caught a buzz for 48 hours when they published a schedule, but it didn't last
The obvious reason for the lack of enthusiasm for me personally must come down to skepticism about a game ever being played
I don’t really see how a spring season works in Big Ten territory or what’s really going to be different in terms of containing the virus in Jan/Feb than it is in September. On the playing front, you only have the Lions, Colts, and Vikings stadiums as playing options (unless I missed one) unless they decide to play games inside schools indoor practice facilities.
And for the virus, even if there’s a vaccine, college aged kids are going to be amongst the last to get it.
Uhhhhh, it is possible to play outside, the NFL does it all the time in the winter.
August 9th, 2020 at 11:41 AM ^
It is possible but far from ideal...February, especially-not outdoors in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. There are indoor venues though...
There is an every other week possibility which would be helpful from a pandemic/quarantine side as well. This could include playing five games in the Fall and five in the Spring...start the Spring games as late as the end of March or the first of April.
All of these options seem like grasping at straws.
There are at least four things that could be better.
1. Better testing - there is tons of work going on in this area and lots of different groups are talking about tests that could provide results in less than an hour for under $5. This would be a game changer. For about $150 a student a semester colleges could test every student twice a week. Football players could be tested multiple times including the day of the game.
2. Therapeutics- it is hard to believe that in another 4 months we won’t have identified more treatment options - there are any number of promising trials underway right now.
3. Better understanding of long term risks and just as importantly, what schools should be doing to screen for those risks before letting athletes return to play if they’ve had Covid.
4. As you mentioned, vaccines - which I think you are right, realistically are not going to help most college students in the timeframe we are talking about - but, even helping high risk alleviates concerns about community spread overwhelming hospitals.
This is not really news so much as confirmation. Many individuals in the sports departments at the universities or even in the media were expecting this if nothing changed dramatically in the past month. - (both groups were purposefully holding back negative info/conversations in hopes that the virus numbers would dissipate and MLB and NBA bubble would be a success).
As discussed, they were hoping for a "miracle" but it's obvious that if you can't run the sport in a bubble atmosphere like the NBA, the risk of spread is inevitable. Putting out the schedule and plans for the season was the right thing to do imo, as they were preparing for the possibility of a best case scenario regarding the virus. The caveat was always there, however, saying "if we go ahead with the fall season." Many of us just chose not to read this as we were hopeful.
A bit of good news - My friend in the AD was not let go and it seems UM at least will not be laying off AD employees for now. This is of course a dynamic, evolving situation - but the internal conversations there amongst employees are much more optimistic than 3 weeks ago.
I hope that the fucking mouthbreathers who think they are making some kind of political point by refusing to social distance or wear masks are happy.
Freedumb! has a cost.
Sometimes I wish natural selection were swifter. But those finches took FOREVER to grow their beaks
August 10th, 2020 at 3:22 AM ^
By natural selection, I assume you mean 'Jesus' selection'.
One medical doctor said if everyone wore a mask for 30 days, this virus crisis would end.
I'm all in.
Dude everybody is wearing a mask right now. Like .25 percent of people are not wearing a mask indoor places in Michigan. It hasn’t done a damn thing to the numbers. Over a month with a mask mandate and cases are going up.
And no, people are not going to adhere to overreaching social restrictions indefinitely in order to watch other people play a sport. People aren’t going to cut themselves from friends and family so that Michigan can have a football team. They don’t care about about it that much. It has no valuable context within the culture right now.
And there wasn’t going to be a college football season since March, 2020. This isn’t a “fluid” situation, it is a preordained one.
They should be doing it so their kids can go to school. If we got this under control enough that we could easily have kids in high school, we’d be watching football too,
Schools have no chance of opening with the insane positions that are being adopted right now to control the spread. The narrative being advanced is prohibitive. And frankly, school will be of little value with the measures being advanced to allow them to.
Socially distance indefinitely, keep kids in a bubble and prevent them from experiencing anything, so that kids can go to school with masks on their face, be kept six feet away from other human beings at all times, be denied extra-curriculars, gym, recess, all socialization, and have their parents literally barred from entry to the school?
Tough sell, man. Tough sell.
August 8th, 2020 at 10:19 PM ^
Schools are in fact opening. See Georgia and Mississippi. With regards to your concerns about rules in schools, is your alternative we just sacrifice the teachers? When one dies, we just go find another? That might not be so good for kids well being either.
August 8th, 2020 at 11:32 PM ^
Seems he's implying that schools shouldn't be open.
I know of one school district that basically said "could we do it, yes. Will it be worth it with all the restrictions we'd need in place? No. No recess, little socialization, constant masks and distancing..."
August 8th, 2020 at 11:51 PM ^
A very very low percentage of people who get this illness die. If your philosophy is “one death is too many” we are going to completely destroy our culture, our economy, our children, in service of a completely untenable standard. Teachers who think they are too high risk to teach children will need to find a new job. I feel for them but we cannot continue to knowingly destroy our society with completely unreasonable expectations and benchmarks.
August 9th, 2020 at 12:00 AM ^
Does anybody ask you to spend 40 minutes 5 times a day with groups of 25 other people in a confined space with no masks? I strongly doubt it, but you feel it is acceptable to ask teachers to do that?
You can’t on the one hand bitch about kids not going back to school then in the next breathe suggests that teachers are the problem for asking for some set of reasonable precautions.
August 10th, 2020 at 8:14 AM ^
SARS Coronavirus in 2002 killed 10% of people it infected. MERS coronavirus kills %30, and it's still floating around. Fortunately, these viruses aren't as contagious as CoVID-19. But, since you have this all philosophically figured out, what percent of people dying is enough to justify measures that experts recommend? Since we have something killing 3-5% of American it infects (thankfully almost no kids), you obviously don't think that death rate justifies kids living with any restrictions. What death rate would justify it? 10%.....20%......?
Like 0.25 percent of people are not wearing a mask indoor places in Michigan? Maybe if you're limiting it to things like grocery stores and restaurants, sure. But not if you're looking at people working in small businesses or any number of other things. Most of the people I know who work at companies under 50 people in Michigan who are working in their offices say that virtually no one in their office wears a mask unless their boss explicitly makes them. And I've been to a couple of restaurants to pick up food where the workers only put on the mask when they are face to face with customers and pull down their masks the rest of the time when they're interacting with their coworkers and even when they're making the food. And that's not even touching on how many people I've seen wearing masks wrong where they aren't covering their nose.
It must be crazy to be in that late to a joke.
Oh, you were joking? Man, I got Poe's Law'd
August 9th, 2020 at 12:20 PM ^
Tex,
I love football too.... so I appreciate your sentiment. It sucks.
However, to me the mask thing and the general state of American society from everything to our belief in science, our willingness for collective sacrifice, the state of the media, the political state., gap between the rich a poor, our our level of patriotism... I could go on here... USA isn't doing so well right now in the indicators of greatness in my mind
The mask thing and our handling of the Corona in general are just a symptom for me of bigger problems, bigger root causes affecting our future as THE place to be, THE leader... and we all should have been concerned about the direction of our country long before these same problems helped to contribute to missing our football season.....
but yea dude, without football I get no distractions until ski season, but that shit isn't happening this year either
When it's over, is it really over?
All the things that we used to say have gone out the window.
It feels as if we keep expecting clarity and certainty when the near future is unclear.
I had a notion that this was going to be the case, much as I was hoping for the moonshot. My job is via a large Clinic down here in Cleveland, and they cant even figure out when IM going back to work. A month ago it was 2 weeks, then it was another week, then another, and then they stopped calling and we are back to "indefinite hold". If those people cant figure it out...welp...
Kicking the can down the road for delaying an entire football season doesn't make sense. I'd like to know exactly when this spring season will be played. You can't wait until mid April to mid May for milder weather in these parts. Then what about playoffs? Are we talking 10 game schedule? Seems to me it would be less. Fall 2021 season would only be a few months way.
August 8th, 2020 at 11:33 PM ^
Hey guys, MRunner73 needs an exact start time, ASAP. Can we please get on that, Mr. Delaney?
It'll be played when it's played. Or it won't.
Well, fuck me.
My favorite part of this whole discussion is the continual back and forth between optimism at a fall season, followed within days by pessimism of a fall season, and repeat. I feel like although everyone continues to recognize the risk and challenges, but no one wants to cancel until there is no longer enough time to have any semblance of a season which means we can expect this for another month or two.
More bargaining. At least they've moved far enough into the real world where the idea that they can just jam through a fall season with all the G5 leagues not playing is finally causing folks to realize how absurd this all is.
I dunno, probably won't work. Starting to hit that pessimism point where we don't get amateur sports until there's a vaccine or at least real scientific studies on the health risks for covid survivors. As long as we're still so in the dark that "well maybe you'll be fine or your heart might asplode" there's not going to be any way to do anything.
Fauci says the following,
I think with a combination of good public health measures, a degree of global herd immunity and a good vaccine, which I do hope and feel cautiously optimistic that we will get, I think when we put all three of those together, we will get control of this, whether it's this year or next year. I'm not certain," he said.
But, he added, "I don't really see us eradicating it."
How long do we continue to close things? It sounds like a vaccine will be in the 50 to 70 percent effective range with mass distribution taking most of next year. Do we just keep our kids home and cancel sports through next summer under the hope the the infection rate will be half of what it is now? What is the acceptable level of risk we are looking for?
Note the CDC puts the IFR at 0.65%. For 20 to 49 year olds it’s 0.0082%. 50 to 65 is 0.12%. Other than known hotspots (where the numbers are now improving) we have plenty of hospital capacity.. We should obviously continue to take reasonable precautions. At the same time what is our goal here? At what positivity rate are we OK with allowing things like football and school?
These percentages of this and that mean nothing to people. And it's totally understandable.
True from day 1 and continues to be true. 1. Infectious person to person. 2. Can and is passed without the person passing it exhibiting any symptoms. 3. No way to predict how each person will be impacted.
We're probably going to be north of 300,000 dead by New Years from this. Parceling out death rates per this case number or that hospitalization number or versus Bulgaria doesn't change the fact of a fiasco. The largest accumulated death total in under a year of any event in US History. In a modern country with all our wealth resources. It absolutey should not happen.
We'll have to figure out how to do things we think we're entitled to do or must do, differently. Because people are rightfully scared.
And VOTE.
So we should do ........ what exactly? What are you trying to argue for here?
I don't know how you can return life to normal until we have some kind of idea of the health risks associated with covid for survivors and what contributing factors there are and whatnot. We're still so in the dark about so much about this virus that wanting to have life be normal and to "stop sacrificing" our pleasures just seems completely unrealistic. Don't quote me mortality rates when we have anecdotes of people having heart attacks/heart damage at under the age of 30 months after having Covid or when we still don't know what long term damage is done to the lungs.
You can't just "play the odds" when we still have no idea what the odds even are.
It’s not a return to life as “normal” vs. not “normal” question. There are degrees to this. can you play football with no fans and safety precautions in place is not talking about returning to normal. Can you return kids to schools in a hybrid approach with strong public health measures in a community with low levels of virus spread is not returning to normal. Note the CDC says we can and Fauci says we can based on our current knowledge of the virus. Despite this local school districts are still closing schools completely when their health departments (the people with expertise around these issues) say the data indicates they can open. If we are not going to go with the advice of our public heath experts who should we listen to?
Relative to the anacdbotal information about the long term health effects we are not completely in the dark and this information is part of the current public health recommendations. We will know more in the future but we will still not know a great deal.it will take years to have a full understanding of the virus and it’s effects. The ambiguity around this will continue and we will eventually open things like schools and sports despite the virus still being a threat. Should that happen now is clearly debatable but I don’t think the answer is as obvious as you appear to. I also don’t think 6 months or a year from now we will have the certainty around the odds you would like.
When it boils down to it, the answer to these issues has always been the same since this virus got here. It is a matter of personal choice and what risk a person is willing to accept. Never has any reasonable goal included “eliminating illness.”
There are known long term impacts of drinking, eating poorly, smoking, tanning, endless number of things. People choose how much risk they are willing to assume. If there are vulnerable people who have to literally close themselves in, I feel badly for them, but that is just the way that it is. Life is not always fair. But to shut down entire segments of society because somebody at risk of complications can be exposed to the coronavirus through five degrees of separation is seriously complete insanity. That is on that person to take precautions to avoid. It isn’t anybody else’s job. That is a complete fallacy.
There was a period of time when we were thoroughly unprepared for the virus and strict measures needed to be implemented to prevent hospital overruns, that was a public health emergency and it wasn’t about individual risk, but that is not where things stand now and, for lack of a better word, this is all starting to get extremely stupid.
What remains is a political weapon, being wielded so recklessly that it is quite staggering, and scary, to watch it unfold. With how seriously fucking crazy people are going with Covid I don’t know if football, or organized sports, will even be a thing anymore when it is over.
Hospitals were over run in Texas last month.
HOUSTON — Houston hospitals have been forced to treat hundreds of COVID-19 patients in their emergency rooms — sometimes for several hours or multiple days — as they scramble to open additional intensive care beds for the wave of seriously ill people streaming through their doors, according to internal numbers shared with NBC News and ProPublica.
At the same time, the region’s 12 busiest hospitals are increasingly telling emergency responders that they cannot safely accept new patients, at a rate nearly three times that of a year ago, according to data reviewed by reporters.
The increase in ambulance diversions, coupled with the spike in patients being held indefinitely in emergency rooms, are the latest indicators that Houston hospitals are straining to keep up with a surge of new coronavirus patients. ProPublica and NBC News have previously reported that a public hospital in Houston ran out of a medication to treat COVID-19 patients and that a spike in at-home deaths from cardiac arrest suggests that the death toll from the coronavirus may be higher than official statistics show.
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