If you know what’s going to happen with college sports in the fall, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey would love to know. He gave an interview with 1010XL radio in Jacksonville yesterday, and the bottom line of it all was this: no one knows exactly what the upcoming sports season is going to look like.
The big takeaway from the interview in the general sports media was that some conferences may play sports even if others aren’t able to do so at the same time.
Looking at the stats at time of publish, the seven states with the largest numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases include those with ACC (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania), Big Ten (New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania), and Pac-12 (California) member institutions before SEC states Florida, Texas, and Louisiana round out the top ten. Texas has four Big 12 programs in it too, so every power conference has at least three programs in top ten states.
But speculating about whether the SEC or Big 12 could stage games if the ACC, Big Ten, and/or Pac-12 can’t due to state-imposed lockdowns is really getting ahead of ourselves, to hear Sankey talk about it. He emphasized that everything anyone is looking at involves “if” statements. The virus is ultimately driving the bus here.
One of the earliest questions the commissioner fielded was about whether students have to be on campus for sports to happen. It was an apparent reference to news from the mid-April meeting between Vice President Mike Pence and the College Football Playoff Management Committee. The strongest message from the FBS commissioner side of things came from the Big 12’s Bob Bowlsby, speaking for himself and his peers: “If we’re not in college, we’re not having contests… we [aren’t] going to have sports until we [have] something closer to normal college going on.”
Sankey did not contradict that statement. “Certainly as a threshold, our universities have to move back towards normal operations,” he said. “That’s the first step to facilitate the return of college athletics onto our campuses. An element of that is the return of students.”
However, he made it clear that the bar wouldn’t be set at all students back on campus as normal. “Now, I can sit on any number of conference calls and learn that we’re adapting to new realities around us: how much distance would be required, what’s testing going to look like, what treatments will be available. … For us in college football, our universities are going to have to be back to operation. Yeah, we’re going to need to be having a semester, but there may be more online content delivery, you may have a lot more spacing in classrooms, which can alter class scheduling patterns.”
In other words, if a school isn’t doing all of its classes entirely in person, it may still be able to play sports. If distancing guidelines on campus preclude full classrooms and require some students to take courses online, or segments of students have to take turns showing up in person versus watching lectures remotely, that may not necessarily mean sports are off the table.
That said, Sankey would highlight the first word in that paragraph’s second sentence: “if”. Anyone can invent any kind of hypothetical right now. Final decisions won’t happen until things are more real, and that won’t happen for a while.
A tougher situation to deal with than some conferences facing state restrictions and others not is what happens if some SEC states have restrictions and others don’t. Four SEC states are in the bottom 11 for COVID-19 tests per capita right now (South Carolina, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky), and four more of that cohort border SEC states (Virginia, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina). If these states can’t significantly improve their testing regimes, they have a higher risk of developing a second wave of cases that could spill over state boundaries.
Sankey was not specific about what would happen if, as the hypothetical posed to him went, most SEC states are ready to go but Louisiana and Texas aren’t. “That’s the hard circumstance,” Sankey said. “We want to do this together. We need to do this together.”
He went on to mention that various states could have different rules about whether and how many fans could be in stadiums, and that’s fairly straightforward. He left it unsaid but implied that programs would follow state regulations about fans and otherwise carry on. It’s less straightforward if teams can’t get together. If, for instance, a state prohibits gatherings of more than 100 people, then a football team can’t run a full practice.
You may have seen Sankey’s quote that goes as follows: “If there’s a couple of programs that aren’t able, does that stop everyone? I’m not sure it does.” That was in response to the conference-level scenario.
When it comes to some SEC programs being able to play but others not, he avoided even hinting at what would happen. I’m sure he doesn’t know because he and his leadership team haven’t made that decision yet. There is precedent for some schools playing and some not within a conference, but that’s from the World War I and so-called Spanish flu era or World War II years. College athletics is a vastly different beast now than it was then.
Sankey did mention another potential hangup. Individual conferences have a lot of leeway, especially in football, but the NCAA still governs some aspects that determine whether teams can play. Preseason camps, an issue Dan Mullen addressed earlier this week, are an example.
“So we’re now looking at, what type of preparatory time is needed?” Sankey said. “How do we communicate that nationally? The NCAA has a role because we govern practice time and practice dates nationally. Because we missed spring football, because we altered strength and conditioning, those have to change. Those start to inform the answer about what if one does this, one can do that, but one cannot. Those will be the harder elements.”
To use Sankey’s favorite word “if” again: if one conference wants to get its sports started while some other conference cannot, the NCAA could prevent that from happening by issuing a ban on practicing. No practice time, no games.
“The desire,” Sankey said, “would be to have 11 states and 14 institutions moving forward in a collective manner, and, as I said, connected nationally, so we can celebrate the return of college sports.”
That would be wonderful. As of right now, there is zero certainty about whether and when that might happen. Conferences are keeping their eyes open and maintaining as much flexibility as possible. We can all speculate and create what-ifs all day long, but we’re months away from certainty about anything.