Among many of the conversations since the coronavirus pandemic left its mark on the sports world is the prospect of having football in the late summer and fall.
The season remains five months away, but with the unknown circumstances surrounding COVID-19, the conversation has continued to gain steam with sports journalists getting word from athletic department officials of the financial fear of not having a college football season.
For Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley, he isn’t ready to entertain that conversation quite yet.
“I definitely haven’t considered (not having the 2020 season),” Riley said during a conference call with the Oklahoma media on Tuesday. “Just because I think that’s so out in front right now that I just don’t know if it’s going to do me or us any good. There are still so many unknowns. We’ve got a plan for if it does happen, if we do have our season. We understand if we do, there may very well be some type of adjustments that we may have to abide by. None of us know exactly what it looks like right now. It’s pure speculation, but you can obviously see … I think it’s pretty clear that it very well could be limiting the amount of people that could participate, watch, all of that. I think that’s very possible.”
There has been plenty of speculation about the upcoming season.
Some saying it’s a 50-50 percent chance of it happening completely. Some talking about no fans in the stands. Others talking about a shortened season, one starting early in July or August or one starting later in January.
That focus isn’t in the right place for Riley.
“I think our focus … I think if we’re spending time of that right now, we’re not spending time on our guys,” he said.” There’s so much organization and so much from a communication standpoint that you have to do right now to keep our guys up and running and do the very best we can for them. We’ll adjust as time goes on. I certainly hope that we can get to a point that we can have it. I said it the other day and I believe it, that I feel by September, the world is going to need football. Hopefully I think a lot of that will be determined by our country’s response to this and how serious every single person takes it. Hopefully we, as a country, can do the best we can.”
Oklahoma is scheduled to begin the 2020 season on Sept. 5 against Missouri State.
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