Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren: ‘We may not have a college football season’
By Scott Rogust
Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren is not optimistic about football this season.
The status for the college football season appeared to be doomed after the Ivy League canceled their season this upcoming fall due to uptick in new COVID-19 cases across the United States. But there was a small semblance of hope on Thursday after the Big Ten announced the upcoming football campaign will be conference-only games.
Even with the announcement, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren revealed, via Kyle Rowland, that he’s “concerned” that a football season will even occur in 2020.
“This is not a fait accompli that we're going to have sports in the fall," Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren said on BTN. "We may not have sports in the fall. We may not have a college football season.”
— Kyle Rowland (@KyleRowland) July 9, 2020
No guarantee there’s even a college football season.
The upcoming season has always been in flux, given the physical nature and close contact of the sport.
We’ve seen various football programs shut down voluntary workouts due to a large number of positive coronavirus tests. Ohio State suspended workouts on Wednesday because of an undisclosed number of COVID-19 cases. This came on the heels of North Carolina making the same announcement to raise the total number of programs on pause to eight.
Playing conference-only games allows the Big Ten to come up with a health and safety protocol for all universities to follow. In the process, the potential of discrepancies by opposing conferences have been eliminated. Additionally, the Big Ten can knock out important division games early in the season in case there are interruptions created by the spread of COVID-19.
While Warren isn’t overly optimistic, he points out the benefits from the decision to open up September by canceling non-conference games.
“The biggest thing is that this affords us an opportunity to be nimble and agile in an uncertain time,” Warren said in a phone interview with Yahoo Sports. “It all ties back to the health and safety of our student-athletes. It’s easy for us to manage operations, the schedule and logistics when we’re focused on the Big Ten conference.”
In regards to any athlete wanting to sit out the upcoming academic year, Warren said that their scholarship will be “honored 100 percent.”
Warren isn’t giving student-athletes and football fans false hope that the season will go on no matter what. Humans don’t determine the timeline to return back to normal, the virus does. And as of this writing, we will have to live in a “new normal” for quite some time.
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