No fall Ivy League sports

the NCAA is probably going to be close behind

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/sports/ncaafootball/ivy-league-fall-sports-football-coronavirus.html

Ivy League Places All Sports on Hold Until January
The league’s decision could be influential for other university presidents as they consider how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. It is the first Division I conference to suspend football for the fall.

By Billy Witz
July 8, 2020, 4:53 p.m. ET

The Ivy League presidents placed all sports on hold Wednesday until at least January, making it the first Division I conference that will not play football as scheduled in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic.

As a result, a broad array of sports, from football and men’s basketball to cross country and sailing, have been placed in limbo. Practices could take place in the fall, but conditions would have to improve for sports to be played next year.

As for the possibility of playing football in the spring, Princeton football Coach Bob Surace characterized it thusly: “One word. Hope.”

He added that a vaccine, better therapies and people following health guidelines would be necessary if there were any chance of playing in the spring, but there is also the fear of a second wave of the virus this winter.

Though the caliber of football in the Ivy League, which plays at the Football Championship Subdivision level and does not allow athletic scholarships, is far below that of the best programs in the country, the decision made by the eight presidents could have great influence among university leaders nationwide tasked with deciding when and how sports will return to college campuses.

Hints that the Ivy League was leaning this way became clearer on Monday when three of its schools announced plans for reopening their campuses to only some students in the fall. One of those schools, Harvard, said it would only allow 40 percent of its students — mostly freshmen — back on campus and that all classes would be held remotely. For the spring semester, Harvard said, freshmen would be sent off campus and seniors would be allowed to return for their final semester.

Football coaches had anticipated this decision since the Ivy League announced last week that it would decide on the fate of fall sports on Wednesday — and in the intervening days two coaches said they had been not asked about making contingency plans. Robin Harris, the executive director of the Ivy League, declined an interview request before the decision was announced.

The Ivy League universities, which are buoyed by large endowments and a powerful academic brand, have largely been able to remove money from decisions regarding athletics. For example, the Ivy League became the last Division I league to hold a conference basketball tournament and is the only league that prohibits its football teams from playing in bowl games or a playoff. And as the start of the college football season has crept into August, the Ivy League has steadfastly stuck to a 10-week season ending on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. This year, it was due to begin on Sept. 19.

The Ivy League also did not flinch on March 10, when it became the first conference to cancel its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, just before the coronavirus began to run rampant in the Northeast.

Almost immediately, the Ivy League was criticized for overreacting, with some of the harshest criticism coming from its own players and coaches. But within two days, the N.C.A.A. tournaments had been canceled, and the N.B.A., the N.H.L. and Major League Baseball’s spring training suspended games.

The Ivy League spokesman Matt Panto said that the conference had not sought a waiver from the N.C.A.A. to move football (or other sports) to the spring, something the official believed would be required. An N.C.A.A. spokeswoman, Stacey Osborn, declined to answer questions about the waiver process.

While pro basketball, soccer and baseball have experienced halting moments in their recent returns with sprinklings of positive tests and hiccups in the testing process, a return of college sports is even more problematic because its players — unlike the professionals — are not paid.

Also, the surge in cases in many pockets of the country over the last month has created more obstacles for the return this fall of college football, which many schools count on for millions of dollars in television, ticket and advertising revenues that fuel athletic departments.

The relatively simple task of bringing football players back to campus for voluntary workouts has in some cases proved so problematic that schools have been forced to abandon them because of Covid-19 outbreaks within their ranks. In the last week, Kansas, Louisiana Tech and Texas-El Paso became the latest to shut down.

Colleges at the lower levels of the N.C.A.A., which is made up of more than 1,100 schools, have already begun to cancel fall sports. Williams, Bowdoin, Swarthmore and Grinnell — all small liberal arts colleges that play at the nonscholarship Division III level — are among those to call off their fall sports seasons.

So, too, have the dozen Division II schools in the California Collegiate Athletic Association, which in May announced that it would cancel fall sports shortly after the Cal State University chancellor said that courses this fall would be held online with few exceptions. But those schools, like Swarthmore, do not play football.

The Patriot League, which includes Lehigh, Lafayette, Fordham and other mostly small colleges in the Northeast with limited athletic scholarships, announced late last month that its fall sports — including football, which competes at the F.C.S. level — would play league competition from the end of September until Thanksgiving, yet travel by airplane would not be permitted. Fordham announced Tuesday that it had canceled its first three games — including a Sept. 12 game at Hawaii. Last week, Lafayette canceled its season-opening game at Navy.

Shortly after the Patriot League announced its restrictions, Morehouse College, which competes at the Division II level, became the first scholarship program to cancel its football season. The decision by Morehouse, a historically Black college, highlighted a troubling prospect: that if the school played football it could potentially harm even more African-American people, which through comorbidity factors, living conditions or inadequate access to health care have shown to be more vulnerable to the most severe effects of the virus.

When asked in an interview how he foresaw college leaders reacting to the recent uptick in cases, Morehouse President David A. Thomas said: “I would hope every president asks themselves that question: Why am I in business? What am I here for?”

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dominos falling

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/...navirus-college-football-season-canceled.html

College Football Season Teeters on the Brink

By John Branch
July 10, 2020

The idea of playing college sports this fall has felt iffy all along, like assembling a massive and unwieldy Jenga tower of good intentions and questionable hopes.

Now, it is teetering with each bit of news, with this week’s among the most seismic in imperiling having a season at all.

The Ivy League shut down sports until at least Jan. 1. Ohio State and North Carolina each had enough positive coronavirus cases among the few athletes on campus that they suspended summer workouts. And the Big Ten Conference soberly announced that most of its fall sports, including football, would play only league games — if they played at all. The Pac-12 Conference did the same Friday, later announcing that its commissioner had tested positive.

One by one the pieces are removed. The tower sways. When will the whole structure come crashing down?

Buddy Teevens, the longtime football coach at Dartmouth, said of the Ivy League.

The Big Ten, the N.C.A.A.’s richest conference, hedged its bets the day after the Ivy League announcement by paring its fall plans. The Atlantic Coast Conference, another one of the Power Five leagues, said Friday it would decide on its fall sports seasons by the end of the month. Teevens, previously the head coach at Stanford and Tulane, admitted that reality had been seeping in, slowly swamping hope.

“It’s been kind of like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny,” Teevens said. “You kind of knew they didn’t exist, and then finally you were told.”

It was bound to be harder to restart sports collegiately than professionally, with their unique breadth of tricky logistics and prickly issues — billions of dollars of revenues propped onto the backs of tens of thousands of amateur athletes, spread across hundreds of campuses and dozens of conferences sprinkled across every corner of the nation.

Athletics hold an outsized role in the nightmare facing American universities. Schools everywhere are staggering toward fall, unsure how to do the most basic things like have classes. It is a matter of life, death and budgets.

Most are jury-rigging plans to educate online, some entirely. Budgets are in tatters. Students are in limbo. Faculty are torn by the bad options of teaching in person during a pandemic and educating through computer screens. Support workers and others linked to campuses wait, but each day seems to make the view murkier.

Colleges, and the towns that support and rely on them, are microcosms of the nation’s anxiety and uncertainty. They face a grudge match between health and economics. The safest option is to keep campuses closed. That might mean economic devastation to colleges and their communities. Is there middle ground?

Now throw athletics into the caldron. Unlike most professional sports leagues, several of which are already struggling to cocoon themselves in tightly monitored, self-described bubbles without getting people sick, there is no way to separate college sports from college environments or society at large.

Even small outbreaks could spread like wildfires into a forest.

So far, more than 3.1 million Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and 133,000 have died. On Wednesday, the day that the Ivy League canceled fall sports, nearly 60,000 new cases were reported in the United States, a new high.

Some of those were college athletes. Through Wednesday, at least 426 had tested positive for the coronavirus among roughly 50 Division I programs, but the number of cases is likely much higher. About half of American universities either did not respond to requests for testing results from The New York Times, or declined to provide numbers, under the auspices of protecting the privacy of student-athletes.

Ohio State, in suspending its off-season workout programs this week, did not reveal how many students tested positive. It only said that the shutdown impacted seven sports, including football.

N.C.A.A., college athletics is an $18 billion enterprise, with schools generating about $10 billion in revenue. And football is the primary moneymaker, especially at places like Ohio State, where the athletics budget surpasses $200 million a year.

“I don’t want to cast aspersions on motives,” the University of Washington epidemiologist Steve Mooney said of the sports world, “but I don’t know if they have my best interests in mind.”

The ethical side of all this may give college philosophy classes, whenever and however they convene, plenty to consider.

Given budget crunches and coronavirus testing problems, should universities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a season to routinely test players, coaches and staff?

“Is this a good use of our resources?” said Dawn Comstock, a sports epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health.

Some schools have asked student-athletes to sign waivers to acknowledge the risk of participating during a pandemic. In a letter to the N.C.A.A., a pair of senators called them “legally dubious” and “morally repugnant.”

To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s character in “Jurassic Park,” questioning the re-creation of dinosaurs: College sports have been so preoccupied with whether or not they could return in the fall that they did not stop to think if they should.

Enter the Ivy League, with its high educational standards and modest athletic ambitions (and significantly lower reliance on revenue from sports compared with Power Five conferences). It was the first Division I conference to shut down in the spring. It was the first to reject returning in the fall.

“I think other conferences around the country are going to follow,” Columbia Athletic Director Peter Pilling said.

Not without a fight. The more money at stake, the more contortions that universities may perform to make sports happen.

That is why much of the scrutiny involves football. With its enormous rosters and sweat-swapping action as a contact sport, football games might seem like a bad idea while fighting a contagious virus.
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more

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continued:

But football is the cash cow that feeds most other athletic programs. Losing just one season — and the television revenue it generates, which can be tens of millions of dollars at major programs — could be devastating to nonrevenue sports, many of which routinely fight for their existence.

Ohio State, for example, has 36 other sports, mostly financed by football. Earlier this week, rich and mighty Stanford cut 11 sports, blaming cascading budgets.

Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott conceded earlier this month. The Big Ten’s move to conference-only games is a half step toward canceling.

The hope is to salvage something. But even if seasons start, outbreaks could end them suddenly, just as they did basketball tournaments and spring sports.

The N.C.A.A., which gave Americans a splash-in-the-face wake-up call when it called off its basketball tournaments last March, may not react with such sweeping gusto this time.

“As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to impact college sports nationally, the N.C.A.A. supports its members as they make important decisions based on their specific circumstances and in the best interest of college athletes’ health and well-being,” it said in a statement on Thursday.

But could the Pac-12 shutter while the Big Ten plays on? Or will one major conference’s decision start the domino chain?

Most expect answers by the end of July.

“I don’t like the trends out there right now, with the numbers and virus increases you see across the country,” Tom Wistrcill, commissioner of the Big Sky Conference, told the Bozeman (Mont.) Daily Chronicle. He estimated the odds for fall sports at 50-50.

Such a half-empty analysis would have seemed unlikely back in March. Leagues like the N.B.A. and Major League Baseball, along with most Americans, considered the virus a passing storm to wait out.

Sports did their part. They sheltered in place. No one can blame the sports world for the broad outbreak or the continued surges through the summer. Not yet.

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lol

 

surely we can extend an olive branch by making this thread more appealing to them:

 

"Maryland suspends football workouts after nine test positive for coronavirus":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...orkouts-after-nine-test-positive-coronavirus/

excerpt:

The Big Ten announced Thursday that fall sports teams, including football, will play only conference opponents this year. Maryland had nonconference football games scheduled against Towson, Northern Illinois and West Virginia. The conference said in a statement that it is “also prepared not to play in order to ensure the health, safety and wellness of our student-athletes should the circumstances so dictate.”

The Big Ten was the first Power Five conference to announce an adjustment to its college football season because of the coronavirus. The Pac-12 announced the same decision Friday. Leaders around the sport have expressed some concern about the likelihood of playing college football this fall.

“We may not have sports in the fall,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said on the Big Ten Network. “We may not have a college football season in the Big Ten.”
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more at the link