The Southeastern Conference will not be bullied by any other conference on the field or off, but optically and logistically its hand may be forced.
Last Friday multiple reports surfaced that the Big Ten was preparing to cancel or postpone its fall sports calendar. Those reports included that the Pac 12 would likely quickly follow suit. With only hours to rally football players from across the country go together in a virtual meeting and released this graphic, getting the hashtag #WeWantToPlay trending No. 1 in the United States.
#WeWantToPlay pic.twitter.com/jvQhE7noGB
— Trevor Lawrence (@Trevorlawrencee) August 10, 2020
More than 10 Gators and a handful of coaches, including Dan Mullen and Tim Brewster have tweeted their support of playing football this fall, but what if the SEC is the only Power 5 school left when its September 26th kickoff rolls around?
“I don’t think that’s the right direction. Could we? Certainly. There’s a difference between could you do something and should you do something in life,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey told Dan Patrick on his radio show Tuesday morning. “We’re actually set up with our schedule and with our own health protocols that we could if that was the circumstance go on our own. I’m not sure that’s the wisest direction but there have been a lot of interesting things happen in college sports since March.”
At the time when the SEC announced it planned to push its kickoff back from September 3rd to September 26th it was the latest starting date of any conference. The Pac 12 is now also scheduled to kick off on that date. The whole point of moving the starting date back and moving to a conference-only schedule was about gaining time to see what the virus does, how an injection of students back to campus will affect those numbers, and give the league time to find answers to safely hold completion. Right now the University of Florida student-athletes are living in a quasi-bubble. The campus is mostly empty, they’re being tested twice weekly, and there are rigorous health and sanitation guidelines the university is following. The student-athletes are committed to following through with everything that is being asked of them, but will their classmates?
A case can be made that student-athletes are safer on campus than they are at home, one that Sankey made Tuesday morning.
“I certainly think we can make a case and have made a case that they’re in much more healthy situation working out in our facilities with medical care, with health protocols around COVID in this new environment,” Sankey said. “Compared to go lift in local gyms with who knows overseeing you, what kind of health expectations, what kind of workouts, what kind of monitoring. I think that’s really, without a doubt, what we’re continuing to do is support the healthy return of competition.”
The SEC has a kickoff scheduled, they will announce dates for their games soon but if any of those dates actually see football remains to be seen. The league itself has enacted more stringent health and safety guidelines than the NCAA mandated and they remain committed to having sports this fall as long as competition can be done safely.
Sankey and the league won’t be bullied by one conference making a decision.
“We treat it as information,” Sankey told Patrick. “It is not going to simply be a guiding moment if another conference makes a decision but a piece of information along with this really, really interesting journey.”
However, the mightiest conference in the land might not have the ability to be the only conference left standing and playing football games this fall if the other Power 5 conferences bow out.