We keep getting leaked information come out of surrounding the Big Ten’s decision to postpone fall sports, and it’s not a good look. There’s definitely a case to be made on a path of abundance of caution to shelve the season because of a global pandemic, but the process by which the decision was arrived at has come into question.
The latest comes from a report by Sam Mckewon of the Omaha World Herald who got Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos to go on record.
According to Moos, he was optimistic about a Big Ten season being played when the league announced a conference only schedule on August 5. The road map was there and it was one that allowed flexibility in the midst of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
However, his optimism quickly waned when he was made aware by Nebraska Chancellor Ronnie Green of a growing sentiment by university presidents and chancellors to postpone the season.
“As we got closer to the decision, I got less and less confident we were going to be playing,” Moos told the Omaha World Herald.
Moos was kept apprised of where things were headed because key, veteran athletic directors were not a part of extremely important Zoom meetings and further discussions. That included Ohio State’s Gene Smith, someone who has already served on several important NCAA boards and decision-making task forces.
Instead, according to Moos, the voice of the athletic directors on those meetings was left to one man, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren.
“He knew where we were coming from, and he was the messenger to the presidents and chancellors.”
Big Ten AD Kevin Warren was the point guy in multiple siloed discussions on if the league would play.
Sometimes it’s not only what you decide, but how. https://t.co/8zqiVHk0y1
— Sam McKewon (@swmckewonOWH) August 23, 2020
And here’s the troubling part — Warren was aware that every single Big Ten athletic director was in favor of trying to play football in the fall. Moos, Ohio State’s Gene Smith, Penn State’s Sandy Barbour, and Michigan’s Wade Manuel pushed the hardest to do everything the league could to push forward, but it was unanimous agreement in wanting to play.
“He knew where we were coming from, and he was the messenger to the presidents and chancellors,” Moos said.
Yet the decision to postpone the fall still happened in the face of a mountain of support and willingness to play by the ADs. Moos said that occurred because things weren’t vetted out with the right people sitting down together.
“I knew where our people stood, but I would have liked to have been in the room when they expressed it to the commissioner and our presidents and chancellors,” Moos said. “The commissioner was operating in silos, and the silos weren’t connected. And, in the end, that created varying degrees of communication not being delivered.”
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In the face of a landslide of criticism and confusion surrounding the Big Ten’s decision, Warren, for his part, did agree that he could have arrived at the decision a little differently.
“What I would have done differently is I would have brought all the parties together,” Warren told Yahoo Sports.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and now the league appears to be slowly burning from the inside out. Parents have sent letters to Warren’s office and staged a protest, Ohio State QB Justin Fields started an online petition to force the Big Ten to overturn its decision, and a league that is usually very united has seen multiple administrators come out and question the way things were handled.
To be fair, Warren was thrust into a no-win situation really. To be a newcomer as the leader of one of the most historical and well-known college athletics leagues is hard enough, one that pulls in more revenue than any other. To do so in the midst of a global pandemic is drawing the short straw in a stack of short straws.
Still though, he was hired to do a job. And unfortunately for the Big Ten, the hard lessons that are being learned and playing out in front of the national media aren’t going to reverse the perceptional hit and loss of revenue that will be felt for years to come.
Nobody is rooting for the three other conferences to be hit hard with the pandemic and a bunch of kids to get sick, but that’s probably what it’s going to take for the other three Power Five conferences to cut bait on the football season this fall.
If that happens, then Warren will look like a genius who went against the desires of his collective athletic community, stood in the fire, and came out the other side.
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