Lincoln Riley ‘proud’ of Oklahoma, program for not waiting on someone else in phase-in plans

Many college football programs are returning players in preparation for the season. Lincoln Riley is proud they didn’t wait on someone else.

Many college football programs have already started the phase-in process of college football players in preparation for the 2020 college football season.

Oklahoma State started its process on Monday. Arkansas the same. Alabama, too. Each of those schools are already seeing players test positive for the coronavirus, with many being asymptomatic.

Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley was vocal about June 1 being a ‘ridiculous’ idea in a zoom conference call in May. The University of Oklahoma and Riley stuck to their guns on it and remain to allow the football facilities on June 1.

“The thing I’m proud of is we didn’t wait for somebody to do it,” Riley said in a zoom conference call on Wednesday. “We didn’t wait for somebody to tell us what we can do. We simply did what we believed was best. We didn’t wait until one of our competitors did it.

“And when our competitors said they were bringing them back early, we didn’t flinch. I think that’s a sign of strong leadership in our university and set our priorities as to what was best and stuck with it.”

No other details have been announced in regards to how players will be phased back in. How often COVID-19 tests will be administered or when the first ones will take place, when players will return to campus or how these workouts will take place.

Now Oklahoma can sit back and watch and see what’s happening across the country with a plan in mind. It’s a decision that was made weeks ago and one that OU hasn’t dove away from.

“I think this is one of the advantages that we talked about for us is that we get to see how this goes,” Riley said. “We knew what we were going to do and it’s been amazing. It’s been close to a month ago that we made that decision. We’ve already learned so much more about it, and some of the testing procedures and quarantine procedures for our players and all that have changed just in that time. So I can’t imagine how much more we are going to learn in the next several weeks.”

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