2020 NCAA Football

loshjott

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Dec 30, 2004
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Football player at Liberty, Tayvion Land, announces plans to transfer due to "racial insensitivity displayed by leadership at Liberty University."
 

Time to Mo Vaughn

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Mar 24, 2008
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Football player at Liberty, Tayvion Land, announces plans to transfer due to "racial insensitivity displayed by leadership at Liberty University."
Land is actually one of two players that announced they're transferring. It should be noted that Land is a 4 star prospect and was the highest rated recruit in school history. Clark, who also announced he's transferring, played in all 13 games and turned into a starter as a true freshman last year.
 

RedOctober3829

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Jul 19, 2005
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deep inside Guido territory
When Pete talks like this, it carries more weight than most. He lays out the case why football should be moved to the spring with quotes from anonoymous prominent Power 5 people.

"We are nearly a month from the start of formal 20-hour per-week college football practices and two months from the sport’s Week Zero kickoff.

As the numbers of positive COVID-19 tests spike across the country, college coaches have become increasingly dour about the prospect of any kind of functional college football season.

Three different Power Five coaches in three different leagues summed up the reality of a conventional and uninterrupted college football season this week as somewhere close to impossible.

“I have no idea how we play,” one Power Five coach told Yahoo Sports. “We are cleared to have 10 guys work out at a time with no one within 10 feet of each other and have to clean the whole weight room. And two weeks later, we can line up in a walk (through) 11 on 11?”

Added another Power Five coach: “If it’s contact tracing and lose a guy for 14 days, I don’t know how we’re going to have a football season.”

The third Power Five coach quantified the chances of a 12-game season being executed in the fall without significant cancellations and chaos as “close to zero” percent.

With workout cancellations and quarantines the new normal at places like LSU, Clemson and Texas – and those are just the ones reported – there’s an emerging feeling that this season is headed toward a buzzsaw of medical risk, mass cancellations and eventual financial disaster. “If it’s not working in [professional] golf and tennis, how is it going to work in football?” asked one high-ranking college official."
And that leaves us with a bigger question: Why has there been no significant discussion about moving the sport to the spring? Yahoo Sports reached out to officials and athletic directors across the major conferences and there’s been little to no significant discussion about delaying the season to assure that it’s safer and more manageable.

Here’s the case for a spring season: The potential for lower health risk and medical advancements from treatments and vaccines, which means more potential fan revenue and a safer environment for players.

“I understand and am concerned about the challenge of playing two seasons in one calendar year,” said a prominent athletic director. “But in light of the country’s uneven progress in fighting the pandemic and some of the recent testing numbers from football programs, we have to revisit the possibility that spring football is the better of two suboptimal choices.”

Why not let the NFL and NBA play out and learn from their mistakes, best practices and benefit from the technology advances that will inevitably come along?

“It’s crazy that no one is seriously talking about playing in the spring right now,” said another Power Five head coach. “We would know so much more six, seven or eight months from now.”

A lot can change in the nearly two months until the season starts, but the lack of exploration of playing football in the spring looks negligent.


“It’s an absence of leadership,” said the high-ranking college official. “From the very beginning, there should have been parallel tracks being planned. A track to play in the fall until that’s untenable and then shift to the spring season track.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/why-the-college-football-season-should-be-moved-to-spring-230453247.html
 

54thMA

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Moving the NCAA football season to the Spring of 2021 makes no sense to me; if you do that, what happens to the actual 2021 season that would be played in the Fall; do you play in the Spring, take a month off and then start up again for the Fall season?

Just bag it for a year and come back in the Fall of 2021 as there is no guarantee, as in none, that things will be any better in the Spring of 2021 than they will be in a few months.

Anyone who's a senior this year can have the option of either going into the draft in the Spring or getting another year of elegibility, or would that violate some NCAA rule as afterall, college football is such a sincere, honest and strait forward endevor.
 

OCST

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Jan 10, 2004
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The 718

OCST

Sunny von Bulow
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Jan 10, 2004
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The 718
Ferentz has got to be fired. There is no way he didn't know that this was happening over 20+ years. I can accept that he didn't know the extent of it. It is more likely he didn't want to know the extent of it. No investigation will be seen as credible if he is still onboard.

On another level way down below disregarding basic human dignity, Iowa will not come even close to being able to recruit black players while he is associated with the program.

I hope they are not crafting some press conference where the AD regretfully accepts his resignation or some such horseshit, and they just fire him for enabling systemic racism for over two decades and leave it at that.
The real outrage here is that a fucking strength coach at a state U makes $800k. We are fucked as a people.
 

axx

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Jul 16, 2005
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How would Spring football even work? It'd be impossible to get a full season in the cold weather schools.
 

Humphrey

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March and April are ok to play football if you have a stadium with artificial turf. The only place where there is a problem is Brown, with natural grass. They'd have to play their first 3 or 4 games on the road, then finish up at home.
 

Awesome Fossum

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I always loved June Jones' suggestion that a G5 league move to the spring season for the exposure, sort of like Tuesday and Wednesday night MACtion on steroids. I know I'll be watching a lot of Ivy League football this spring if they're the only conference that makes the jump.
 
I always loved June Jones' suggestion that a G5 league move to the spring season for the exposure, sort of like Tuesday and Wednesday night MACtion on steroids. I know I'll be watching a lot of Ivy League football this spring if they're the only conference that makes the jump.
You'd need to have at least two conferences do this, and then play all of their out-of-conference games against each other, and then forego bowl games except against each other. So yeah, probably not.
 

Awesome Fossum

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Well, I think his full suggestion was for the entire G5 to make the jump, which the AAC Commissioner did NOT appreciate from the head coach of SMU.

"Probably not" is an understatement; this is pure fantasy. But I don't see why non-conference games or a bowl game are strictly necessary.
 
I don't think the whole G5 would ever abandon fall football, and with it the possibility of playing games against P5 schools. But as long as we're just spitballing, I could absolutely envision the FCS moving to the spring, and filling the football void that the XFL and other minor leagues have attempted to fill over the years. (You could even coordinate the schedules with the FBS schools to allow one FBS vs. FCS spring game per school, either in addition to or instead of the intrasquad spring games the FBS schools normally play.)
 

genoasalami

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Sep 4, 2006
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It's July 3rd. College football is 2 months away. Would the season start next Saturday under current Covid situation? There will be no vaccine until the season is over. Can they play in the fall with players on just about every team testing positive during the season? Yes, will be a ton of positive tests. If they do play, it'll be a constant "Blank U will be missing 3 starters this week, all of which tested positive for Covid, they hope to have some of them back in two weeks"
 

NJ_Sox_Fan

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USC vs Alabama is week 1 - how is that happening when (1) USC has told students they are not coming to school for the fall semester? It seems like that would cause a lot of backlash in both directions, no? It is safe enough for football players to come, but not students? And vice versa.

Regarding testing, I think really that sports ought to move to a symptomatic based approach - a positive test is meaningless if there are no symptoms. If the State is not requiring my employees who test positive but have no symptoms stay out of work until they get a negative test, and I am running nursing homes full of elderly and compromised people, I do not see why college athletes could not test positive, be asymptomatic, have them monitored for 72 hours for fever/symptoms, and then still play if no symptoms present themselves.

Maybe I am jaded because of the industry I am in, but I feel like all of the sports organizations are making this FAR more difficult than needed.
 

jk333

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Regarding testing, I think really that sports ought to move to a symptomatic based approach - a positive test is meaningless if there are no symptoms. If the State is not requiring my employees who test positive but have no symptoms stay out of work until they get a negative test, and I am running nursing homes full of elderly and compromised people, I do not see why college athletes could not test positive, be asymptomatic, have them monitored for 72 hours for fever/symptoms, and then still play if no symptoms present themselves.

Maybe I am jaded because of the industry I am in, but I feel like all of the sports organizations are making this FAR more difficult than needed.
A positive test isn’t meaningless, it means someone could be infectious.

You don’t need a negative to return because PCR tests don’t tell if virus is viable. Just wait 9 days post symptoms.

If they’re actually planning to play football this fall, they should just test the symptomatic players. If they’re trying to control infections, their current method is best.

If/when players test positive, they need to be quarantined for the 9 days where they can be infectious. You can’t let players known to be positive infect others.

Universal testing with asymptomatics is awkward because most studies have focused on being infectious days post symptoms. FWIW, the 14 days quarantine covers all the iterations of this but is overkill when testing symptomatics. (9 days for them, not 14)
 

NJ_Sox_Fan

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A positive test isn’t meaningless, it means someone could be infectious.

You don’t need a negative to return because PCR tests don’t tell if virus is viable. Just wait 9 days post symptoms.

If they’re actually planning to play football this fall, they should just test the symptomatic players. If they’re trying to control infections, their current method is best.

If/when players test positive, they need to be quarantined for the 9 days where they can be infectious. You can’t let players known to be positive infect others.

Universal testing with asymptomatics is awkward because most studies have focused on being infectious days post symptoms. FWIW, the 14 days quarantine covers all the iterations of this but is overkill when testing symptomatics. (9 days for them, not 14)
Maybe. Haven't the "experts" waffled back and forth on this a few times - as in if you can actually be asymptomatic and spread the virus? The more testing you do, the more positives you will come up with.

Either way, I cannot fathom why sports needs more stringent testing than the healthcare industry, especially with all the false positive tests in asymptomatic people. I would think a concussion or even paralysis is more likely than an athlete getting Covid from playing football and it having any serious ill effect on him.

We have had countless staff members in our centers test positive, who had tested negative the week prior, and then negative 3 days after the positive, and again 7 days after. So, either 3/4 negatives are wrong, or the 1/4 positives are. Either way, we have not had a new symptomatic case since April 17(staff) or May 1st (resident), and have had countless asymptomatic positive results over the last 2+ months. One would think with the population we have in our buildings that IF it was easily transmittable via an asymptomatic person, we would have many, many more problems on our hands here ...

There is some risk for sure, but there is already an abundance of risk in playing football to begin with
 

jk333

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Maybe. Haven't the "experts" waffled back and forth on this a few times - as in if you can actually be asymptomatic and spread the virus? The more testing you do, the more positives you will come up with.

Either way, I cannot fathom why sports needs more stringent testing than the healthcare industry, especially with all the false positive tests in asymptomatic people. I would think a concussion or even paralysis is more likely than an athlete getting Covid from playing football and it having any serious ill effect on him.

We have had countless staff members in our centers test positive, who had tested negative the week prior, and then negative 3 days after the positive, and again 7 days after. So, either 3/4 negatives are wrong, or the 1/4 positives are. Either way, we have not had a new symptomatic case since April 17(staff) or May 1st (resident), and have had countless asymptomatic positive results over the last 2+ months. One would think with the population we have in our buildings that IF it was easily transmittable via an asymptomatic person, we would have many, many more problems on our hands here ...

There is some risk for sure, but there is already an abundance of risk in playing football to begin with
I think we somewhat agree. Just not sure the NCAA is going to be okay with allowing entire teams to become infected which is what will happen. With universal testing, they can at least say they are trying to stop spread.

Why do you think there are so many false positives? It’s not common for PCR. More likely they’re catching dead virus weeks later or performing nasal swabs badly.

Most people agree that asymptomatics aren’t causing many infections. But there are many infections caused by people who are presymptomatic.

Even for highly contagious people the majority of transmission is the day before symptoms and the first couple days after.

Edit: I don’t think the experts have waffled too much. The news has been all over the place in providing a mixture of the most alarming and most up to date information
 
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NJ_Sox_Fan

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I think we somewhat agree. Just not sure the NCAA is going to be okay with allowing entire teams to become infected which is what will happen. With universal testing, they can at least say they are trying to stop spread.

Why do you think there are so many false positives? It’s not common for PCR. More likely they’re catching dead virus weeks later or performing nasal swabs badly.

Most people agree that asymptomatics aren’t causing many infections. But there are many infections caused by people who are presymptomatic.

Even for highly contagious people the majority of transmission is the day before symptoms and the first couple days after.

Edit: I don’t think the experts have waffled too much. The news has been all over the place in providing a mixture of the most alarming and most up to date information
We are all nasal swabs in our industry, so it is very well possible that there is some user error since it is many nurses performing the swabs over (for us) 14 buildings.
 

genoasalami

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College kids being college kids will lead to a lot of this.... "MLS restart game between FC Dallas and Vancouver Whitecaps has been postponed to a later date after six Dallas players tested positive for coronavirus and Vancouver arrived late after two inconclusive tests"
 

RedOctober3829

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This article gives off a serious feel like before the Ivy League cancelled their hoops tournament and everyone else followed suit.
An impending choice by a conference that plays in the Football Championship Subdivision could have an impact that stretches across college football.

College athletics is bracing for the Ivy League’s decision regarding fall sports in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, an announcement that is expected to come down on Wednesday. Multiple football coaches in the Ivy League told The Athletic over the weekend that they expect Wednesday’s announcement to be that the league is moving all fall sports, including football, to spring 2021. The coaches spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conference has not announced its final decision.

“In order to have an effective season without hiccups, time is the answer,” one Ivy League coach told The Athletic. “If we play in the spring, it won’t bother me.”

Added another Ivy League coach on Sunday: “That seems most realistic now with cases spiking in so many places.”

But the move wouldn’t simply be about eight schools. College athletic administrators throughout Division I told The Athletic that they expect a cascading effect following the Ivy League’s decision, adding that it essentially will give other FCS leagues — such as the Patriot League, to start — cover to make similar decisions. Those administrators expect the final decisions regarding a fall football season to then be made at the Group of 5 level and, by early August at the latest, at the Power 5 level.

On March 12 the Ivy League was the first college sports entity to cancel its basketball conference tournament. The conference endured two days of rampant criticism, with many fans, pundits and even some administrators elsewhere considering it an overreaction. Then, as the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic crystallized, more conferences followed suit and by early evening March 12, the NCAA tournament was canceled.

Could the Ivy League’s decision regarding football be a harbinger of what’s to come at other levels once again? It’s possible. As one Power 5 administrator put it, a lot of university presidents — particularly those at top academic institutions in the Power 5 — consider Ivy League schools their peers. And they respect the level of research and expertise coming out of those campuses, as society at large waits for a COVID-19 vaccine.

“My suspicion is that the majority of presidents in the FBS are uncomfortable with the notion of playing football this fall but for various reasons don’t want to be the first to step out and say that,” the Power 5 administrator told The Athletic. “So, more than anything else, that decision provides the cover they need. I expect it’ll be a big domino.”
https://theathletic.com/1911122/2020/07/06/will-college-football-season-actually-happen-this-fall-ivy-league/
 

Awesome Fossum

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Is there any chance the Ivy League uses this as an opportunity to get out of football entirely for CTE reasons? I assume the answer is no, but curious if anyone thinks otherwise.
 

loshjott

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Big 10 announced conference only for all fall sports, not just football. This reminds me of the short-lived half measures leagues were putting out in Feb/March before shutting everything down.