Oklahoma football: Big 12 commish worries about disrupted fall season
By Chip Rouse
Oklahoma football, as all of college football, is in a state of flux right now — will there be football in the fall, if so what form will it take, how will social distancing apply and will it be with or without fans?
All very reasonable questions given the new world order surrounding the global COVID-19 pandemic, and all without answers to this point.
While most coaches, players and fans are worried that there may not be a 2020 college football season, some, like Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, aren’t as concerned that there won’t be a season as much as a season that gets disrupted because of a recurring outbreak of the potentially deadly virus as the weather turns colder in the fall.
In a 28-minute interview this week on SiriusXM Big 12 Radio, the Big 12 chieftain spoke about his concerns, potential scenarios and the adjustments schools will have to make to play football this fall.
Oklahoma Sooners Football
Bowlsby revealed that among his larger concerns is not if teams, like the Sooners, would be able to start the season, but rather would it be possible to make through a full season, including the College Football Playoff, without facing a disruption, or the need to cancel the remainder of the season, like what happened this year with late winter and spring college sports.
“I worry more about the end of the season and the postseason than I do the beginning parts of the season,” the Big 12 commissioner said.
Bowlsby said we will be very lucky to start the college football season on time over Labor Day weekend and make it through the entire season without a disruption. He did say, however, that with warmer weather forthcoming, schools should be able to allow students back on campus and that practicing and conditioning will resume. The season may not start exactly as currently scheduled, but we should be able to get the 2020 season underway.
The Big 12 head discussed several potential situations for which contingency plans will be necessary. For example, will the games be played with or without fans, and if fans are going to be allowed to attend, how many and with what restrictions. It’s not likely we’re going to pack in 100,000 fans to a game. With social distancing, will that number be reduced to something like 25,000 or even less?
He used the annual Red River Showdown rivalry between Oklahoma and Texas as an example of a possible disaster in waiting.
“When you think about a petri dish for spreading infection, can you think of one better than the State Fair of Texas, where the Cotton Bowl is located and where the OU-Texas game is played every year? “Bowsby said.
How do you have that game at the Cotton Bowl next season, he asked, “when you’ve got to walk through 300,000 people in the outer reaches (on the fairgrounds)” just to get to the stadium? “It’s those kinds of things that we’re going to have to think ourselves through.”
The Big 12 commish also posed the scenario: What if someone, say, on the Texas Tech football team tests positive for the coronavirus and Oklahoma is scheduled to come to Lubbock to play the next weekend but decides, after learning about the situation, it doesn’t want to play the game because of the risk of exposing the Sooner players to the virus. Does Texas Tech forfeit? Oklahoma? or is it ruled no game?
And what if you aren’t able to complete a nine-game conference schedule and some teams are only able to play six games, while others are able to complete seven. How do you determine who the conference champion is?
These are just a few of the variables, we have to be ready for, Bowlsby said in the SiriusXM interview.
We don’t have the answers to these multi-faceted situations yet, but the one thing we do know with some degree of certainty is that it won’t be business as usual when the next college football season commences. We are in uncharted waters, and the unavoidable consequences of that are becoming adjusted to a new normal.