If you are a USC or Pac-12 football fan wondering what will happen with your team’s athletes this fall — in the absence of actual games on Saturdays — that particular question is being wrestled with by administrators in both the Pac-12 and Big Ten Conferences.
The fact that the Pac-12 and Big Ten have both shut down fall football (with the Big Ten receiving considerable pushback, as we noted on Sunday) means that the two Power Five conferences have to consider what to do with their athletes in the next several months. This is part of a longer and more complicated conversation about separating or integrating athletes with the other members of the general student population on college campuses. This conversation includes the question of whether to allow any students onto campuses at all for the 2020 fall semester, given the concerns about the coronavirus. Administrators are basically working with a Rubik’s Cube, trying to shift all these different components into an alignment which balances every possible consideration.
Schools want to get some students on campus and into a dorm room so that they can collect room and board expenses. They want to be able to offer a full campus experience to justify tuition rates as they currently exist. They want to go as far as they can while still preserving public health and safety, and while operating within the guidelines put forth by their state’s governor and other local health officials. This is an extremely complicated calculus, as one can readily appreciate.
In the Big Ten and Pac-12, the landscape is different from the SEC, Big 12, and ACC, given the decision to shut down fall football. What’s next in the Big Ten and Pac-12?
A particular person spoke about this on Monday. Her statement is less important than the fact that she spoke up in the first place:
PSU AD Sandy Barbour on what will be allowed for Big Ten/Pac-12 football players this fall: "It won't look exactly spring ball-ish but it'll be a hybrid."
— Nicole Auerbach 😷 (@NicoleAuerbach) August 17, 2020
The folks in Berkeley might have the best appreciation of the importance of this development.
Sandy Barbour, you might recall, was the athletic director at the University of California before she moved to Penn State. She therefore holds down a Big Ten AD position while having previously worked in the same capacity in the Pac-12 (dating back to the conference’s days as the Pac-10). She therefore represents a crossover figure who can speak not just to the Big Ten’s current reality, but also the Pac-12’s set of circumstances.
Maybe the Big Ten and Pac-12 will propose appreciably different plans or roadmaps for their respective schools’ football players this fall. Yet, one cannot ignore how the Big Ten has charted a course the Pac-12 has seen fit to largely follow. No, the Pac-12 hasn’t operated on autopilot — it has made its own medical consultations and has to live with governors and health officials separate from those in Big Ten states. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the coronavirus politics of the Pac-12 are reasonably close to the Big Ten, set apart from the SEC-Big 12-ACC triumvirate.
Sandy Barbour might not be the final authority on any potential joint plan the Big Ten and Pac-12 might devise — if such a plan emerges at all — but among the various leaders in collegiate athletics whose words should be taken seriously on the Big Ten’s and Pac-12’s plans for the fall, Barbour would rate higher rather than lower on the list.
This should get USC’s attention, and one would presume it will.