Oklahoma football: OU players can return June 15 for voluntary workouts
By Chip Rouse
Oklahoma football players will be able to return to campus for voluntary workouts on or after June 15.
The Big 12 board of directors on Friday approved a phase-in plan that “allows student-athletes to return to campus to engage in voluntary activities related to sport participation.”
Sooner football players and support personnel can return to the Norman campus for voluntary participation in training and conditioning programs. Athletes in other fall sports may return on July 1, and personnel involved in all other varsity sports programs will be allowed back on campus beginning July 15.
Other than establishing the dates for when the football players and other student-athletes could return to campus, the Big 12 did not elaborate on any other details or protocols that could be required upon the arrival of the athletes and other support personnel to guard against the risk of COVID-19 exposure.
The SEC, for example, is requiring a series of testing procedures to ensure the health and safety of its student-athletes. It is highly likely that the Big 12 will — and should — require similar safety procedures, although there was no such disclosure in the board of directors’ action on Friday.
The SEC is allowing athletes in all sports to return to school and begin voluntary activities on June 8, a week before the Big 12 directive.
The June 15 return date for the Sooner players appears to be a reasonable compromise from the postion taken by OU head coach Lincoln Riley and athletic director Joe Castiglione. After the NCAA Division I Council announced earlier this week that voluntary on-campus activities could resume in June for football and men’s and women’s basketball, a number of schools were set to return student-athletes beginning June 1.
Riley’s position has been that returning players as early as June 1 was irresponsible and unnecessarily endangered their health and safety. He and Castiglione both believed that the schools could accomplish all they needed to be ready for the season by exercising a little more patience and by delaying all return-to-campus procedures another month.
“We get one good shot at this,” Riley said in a Zoom call with reporters a week ago, “and we gotta get it right.”
The Big 12 announcement is the latest in a week in which plans and preparations have been activated on multiple fronts in an effort to lay the groundwork for the return of college football in the fall amid continued health and safety concerns stemming from what we know and still don’t know about the coronavirus.