Oklahoma football: Week off may bury all hopes of OU fall football

By now you may have heard Oklahoma football has “paused” preseason training camp.

Head coach Lincoln Riley announced the move on Saturday along with the news that the players are being allowed to go home for a few days before returning on Friday.

It’s the second part of that news that is the most troubling. The other news, although downplayed somewhat because of a stellar COVID testing record during the month of July, is that one Sooner player tested positive this week for the coronavirus.

The OU players underwent two rounds of testing this past week, with 205 players tested. The player who tested positive is currently in quarantine. It was the first time a Sooner player had tested positive for the coronavirus in five consecutive weeks, or since July 1.

“With the opening game pushed back a week or two, it only makes sense to spread out our practices and give our guys some time away,” Riley said in a news release issued by the OU athletic department.

This comes less than 24 hours after the Mid-American Conference became the first FBS conference to cancel the fall football season.

Also, in the past couple of weeks large numbers of players in the Pac-12 and Big Ten conferences have banded together and sent separate formal letters to their conference offices and the NCAA showing solidarity and  expressing serious concerns about the plans that are in place to protect their health and safety in the midst of the continuing coronavirus pandemic.

The Missouri Valley Conference (the league that Missouri State, Oklahoma’s scheduled season-opening opponent is a member of) on Friday announced that it is moving its conference-only schedule to the spring but is leaving fall nonconference games to the discretion of its individual members.

With the OU players being allowed to go back home, effectively leaving the controlled environment they’ve been subjected to for the past five weeks, it not only becomes a test to see how disciplined they can be in following recommended safety guidelines, but also puts them at greater risk of COVID-19 exposure, either knowingly or unknowingly.

The protocols and operating procedures that were in place during the time the Sooner players have been on campus have been exceptionally effective. Now everything effectively reverts back to square one with the players being allowed to go home for some time off.

It will be very interesting to see how the initial round of COVID testing goes upon their return late next week.

"“We’re mindful of all the conversations across the country with regard to the 2020 season,” Riley said. “The added benefit of temporarily breaking from training camp is that it gives us a few more days to monitor those talks.”"

All of this may be for naught anyway because it is appearing more and more as if the dominoes are picking up momentum and toppling in a direction that is leaving the Power Five leagues as the last bastion of defense in preserving a fall college football season.

And no conference wants to be the last one standing in coming to grips with this ever-changing crisis.

We all want football in the fall — some would contend their sane lives depend on it after half a year of near isolation from normal everyday activity — the fans want it, the players actually want it and the schools are desperate for some kind of revenue stream.

But is it really going to be possible, or even practical, with all the health and safety hurdles that are out there to overcome and the high risk we would be asking the players and football staff to take on, given the storm warnings we are all under?

A simple plus-minus analysis paints a pretty clear picture. It isn’t the picture we want to see, but it’s the reality we’ve been dealt. College football needs to face the facts and be sensible about all of this.

And above all else, the powers that be must answer the question: What is truly gained forcing a round peg in a square hole and going forward with a chopped-up fall season that is likely to face more disruptions along the way, while putting the players at increasing risk as the season progresses?

At the end of the day, what would we really be awarding: a champion’s trophy or a survivor’s trophy?