It was a who’s who of famous people at Churchill Downs for Saturday’s race.
In the 146 years since the Kentucky Derby began, it has become a premier destination for world-famous celebrities and athletes on an annual basis.
Every May, the rich and famous flock to Louisville, Kentucky, to see the race in person, and with the event returning to full capacity in 2022 after two years of limited attendance, you can bet there were a lot of notable people arriving at the track on Saturday morning for the event, which could see more than 150,000 people in the stands.
From Jack Harlow to Kentucky Wildcats quarterback Will Levis, a potential top pick in the 2023 NFL draft, it was certainly a who’s who at Churchill Downs.
The race is set to begin at 6:57 p.m. ET on Saturday evening on NBC, but before we find out who will capture the first leg of this year’s triple crown, let’s take a look at who all was on hand for the festivities.
Both Quay Walker and Devonte Wyatt were 95th percentile athletes for their respective positions. The Packers love elite athletes in the first round.
The Green Bay Packers broke a few tendencies during the first round of the 2022 NFL draft on Thursday night, namely taking an inside linebacker and an older prospect, but in many ways, the Packers also continued a big trend: Brian Gutekunst targeted elite athletes in the first round.
Linebacker Quay Walker and defensive lineman Devonte Wyatt both tested like top-tier athletes at their respective positions.
“Their speed and explosiveness is off the charts,” Gutekunst said following the first round.
Walker, at almost 6-4 and 241 pounds, ran the 40-yard dash in 4.52 seconds, hit 32″ in the vertical leap, covered 10-2 in the broad jump, finished the short shuttle in 4.32 seconds and the short shuttle in 6.89 seconds and completed 23 reps on the bench press. His Relative Athletic Score is 9.63 out of 10.0, meaning he’s a 96 percentile athlete among all linebackers entering the NFL.
Walker finished in the 95 percentile for height, 87th percentile for broad jump, 97th percentile for 40-yard dash, and 93rd percentile for three-cone among linebackers.
Gutekunst said Walker has impressive “sideline to sideline” ability and elite speed and range.
Wyatt, at almost 6-3 and 304 pounds, ran the 40-yard dash in 4.77 seconds, including a 1.60-second 10-yard split. He also hit 29″ in the vertical leap, covered 9-3 in the broad jump and completed the short shuttle in 4.63 seconds and three-cone drill in 7.45 seconds. His RAS is 9.56 out of 10.0.
Watt finished in the 87th percentile for broad jump, 99th percentile for the 40-yard dash and 10-yard split and 84th percentile for three-cone drill among defensive linemen.
He called Wyatt a “dynamic pass rusher” who can move in impressive ways against the run.
“His ability to scrape and get to the ball in the run game is almost linebacker-like,” Gutekunst said.
The Packers, who hadn’t drafted an inside linebacker in the first round since 2005, believe adding Walker’s length and athleticism will allow the defense to stay in more two-linebacker looks. In Walker and De’Vondre Campbell, defensive coordinator Joe Barry now has two players at the position who can run like the wind, play downhill in the run game and disrupt passing lanes.
Wyatt might be an older prospect (24 years old), but he gives the Packers defensive front another athletic penetrator to go along with Kenny Clark. He played all over the defensive front at Georgia, and his power and twitchy movement ability should give him similar versatility for Barry up front.
The Packers love taking elite athletes in the first round. In fact, all of Gutekunst’s seven first-round picks – including Walker and Wyatt – have had a Relative Athletic Score of 8.0 or higher, including five at 9.0 or higher:
Seattle Seahawks safety Jamal Adams confessed that he feels afraid outside of the team’s headquarters given the state of race relations.
The recent shooting of Jacob Blake, one of multiple such incidents in 2020, has really shaken the nation. On Saturday, Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll spoke out about how Black Americans have done everything they can to make their voices heard and that action must be taken sooner rather than later.
The following day, safety Jamal Adams admitted to feeling vulnerable outside the team’s headquarters as he discussed his fears about racial violence potentially affecting him and those close to him.
“You know, I’d be lying to you if I said I’m all right,” Adams said during his press conference on Sunday. “This building is my escape place. When I take my sweatshirt off, my sweatpants off that say Seattle Seahawks, I’m back to normal life as a black man. We don’t know what’s going to happen. If it doesn’t affect you as a person outside of the race of being black, you won’t care, it doesn’t bother you, you live your everyday life.”
Adams is not the first Seahawk to publicly proclaim that he fears for his life simply because of his race, as his teammate and fellow safety Quandre Diggs spoke at length about his feelings concerning the situation as well. In fact, Adams stated that he confessed his fear to his new teammates in Seattle.
“I’m afraid,” he told them. “I fear for my life as a black man, and I shouldn’t fear for my life. It’s tough to continue to do what I do. When I take off my Seahawks gear, I’m just another black guy in the community, another black guy in the street. It’s a tough concept to swallow. I’m afraid every time I walk by a cop. I’m afraid every time a cop pulls me over. I’m afraid when I walk into a restaurant or a bar, and they tell me that I can’t have those pants on or I can’t have those shoes on. I’m afraid.”
Adams lamented that not enough caucasians are caring or even paying attention to the racial issues at hand, and stated he hopes that it will not take athletes getting shot for them to change their views.
“I fear for my niece’s life, I fear for my nephew’s life, I fear for my brother’s life, I fear for my parents’ life. I fear for my brothers, because I don’t know when my time is up, I don’t know if I’m next. I don’t know if—is enough enough? Will I be the one that has to be the guy for people to understand that they’re killing unarmed black people? Does a top athlete have to go down for people to really listen and understand why? There’s no justifying anything. There’s no justifying, ‘he had a knife,’ there’s no justifying, ‘Oh, he was on drugs,’ there’s no justifying. Murder is murder. Wrong is wrong and right is right, it’s as simple as that.”
Seattle Seahawks safety Quandre Diggs said that athletes and ordinary people must continue to make their voices heard to bring about change.
North American sports events were racked with player protests on Wednesday in the aftermath of the shooting of Jacob Blake. Some, like the NBA playoffs, even had some games postponed. Seattle Seahawks safety Quandre Diggs stated Friday that in the wake of the numerous incidents of racial discrimination and violence against Black people by police officers in the United States, he constantly fears for his family and makes sure he contacts his mother every day as a result.
“We’re more than entertainers, we’re more than athletes,” Diggs said. “We have families outside of this. My whole family’s black, so at the end of the day, I’m scared for them every day. I call my mom every day. No matter if I’m a multi-millionaire or not, she worries about me each and every day.”
Diggs heaped praise on the athletes across various sports leagues protesting the current state of affairs and stressed that they should continue to make their voices heard as much as possible.
“I applaud those guys. I applaud the NBA players, the WNBA players, MLB, all those guys that were able to take a stand and just shut the world down,” Diggs said. “Even if it was that day, that made a statement. It’s crazy times in the world, and at some point as athletes, as entertainers, it’s our job to let people know . . . I have respect for those guys, and I think as a league, as the NFL we’ve got to come together, we’ve got to figure out what our message is going to be, and just continue to keep the voices going and keep the movement going – don’t let our voice not be heard.”
Diggs emphasized that in addition to athletes, other notable figures with sizable platforms like high-profile celebrities must join in and publicly advocate for change and that all people should try to do the same, even if the impact is initially minimal.
“Anywhere, wherever you’re working at, whatever you’re doing in your life, you can always make an impact on somebody,” Diggs stated. “Of course we’ve got the bigger platform, and we’ve got to continue to use our platform, but people in my little town of Angleton, Texas, they can use their platform any way they have it. You can have impact on somebody, and all you have to do is leave an impact on one person every day, and you can help change the world. We all need to do better, and that’s including myself. The only way this world is going to get better is if we all do better and we all collectively do it better.”
If these incidents between police and Black civilians continue to occur with such frequency, the protests from athletes and postponements of sports games will likely follow suit.
Dr. Warner Greene is a senior virologist at the Gladstone Institutes in California, he gives his take on if CFB in 2020 will be safe.
The Coronavirus pandemic has left the mass public with a lot of questions regarding when the United States will return to some sense of normalcy. One aspect of everyday life that many in the past never questioned was if there will be a college football season.
Whether it be Alabama, LSU or Clemson, some of the most noteworthy college football programs seem to have already had players affected by the virus.
Numbers of those infected are growing everyday across the country, and that is paired with a rising number of deaths due to the Coronavirus.
What can college football programs do in order to ensure the safety of their players, coaches and countless other staff members that are involved in keeping everything in motion behind the scenes.
Photo credit: Jake Crandall
Dr. Warner Greene, MD, Ph. D, is a senior virologist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California and a Senior Investigator with a focus on HIV Cure Research. He is also self-admittedly, a bigger college basketball fan than he is a college football fan, Stanford to be specific.
Dr. Greene has spent over 25 years focusing on HIV, however has recently had to shift his laboratory focus on researching the Coronavirus.
A common argument, when discussing COVID-19, is that younger people in good health, who contract the virus, won’t suffer any adverse health effects. Dr. Greene claims that young people, like those that would be playing college football, aren’t immune to those dangerous effects of the virus.
“While young people, in general, have this sense that they can handle this, I think some of that false security is prompting some of the social behavior of young people,” says Dr. Greene. “They are not completely immune to the adverse effects of this virus, and they certainly can serve as transmitters of the virus to people who clearly are at higher risk.”
Transmitting the virus to those at higher risk is an issue often overlooked when discussing the return of collegiate athletics. While the athletes will more than likely not suffer greatly from contracting the virus, what about those at higher risk?
“The fact is that most young people will handle the virus fine, they may have minimal symptoms or just moderate symptoms,” says Dr. Greene. “But the greatest risk that they pose is the transmission of the virus to more susceptible people. In general, that’s a people of a greater age.”
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The CDC states that people in their 60s and 70s are at a higher risk of severe illness from contracting the Coronavirus. Alabama’s head coach, Nick Saban, will be turning 69-years old during the 2020 college football season, therefore, he is at a high risk of severe illness if contracting it from just one of his asymptomatic, seemingly healthy, players.
The NBA recently announced they will be resuming their season with players and staff under strict quarantine, or a “bubble,” at Disney World in Orlando, Florida to ensure the health and safety of everyone involved. Why can’t colleges do that?
The care and attention student-athletes require are from people that can’t be quarantined along with them, such as teachers, multi-sport trainers, conditioning staff and more. Whereas at the professional level, each team has their staff dedicated to working solely with their limited number of athletes.
So what can collegiate programs do to play and practice in a way that won’t put everyone at risk?
Dr. Greene believes that if there is a college football season, it will be played without fans in the stadium.
He also argues that the only way for programs to keep everyone healthy is for teams to invest in testing. The virologist’s golden question is: “Can you keep your college team healthy?”
“The only way to do that is to be frequently testing, almost on a daily basis, testing members of the team, so that you can immediately remove someone that’s infected and their immediate contacts, but almost in real time,” says Dr. Greene. “That’s the only way to try and keep the team as healthy as possible. And even that may not be perfect.”
The ability to test for the Coronavirus on a daily basis is now available, the testing machine Dr. Greene has at his facility cost upwards of $50,000 and can produce results in minutes. The prices can vary, but this is a rough estimate of one investment programs will have to make if they want football.
At the end of the day, he believes that the universities will have to make their own decisions on playing in 2020.
“I think every university’s going to have to make their own calculations on that,” says Dr. Greene. “We have not yet learned how to effectively live with this virus. We now understand that you can’t open up your society when viruses are still rampant within the community. You cannot stop wearing mass, we cannot stop social distancing. It’s a balance between the quality of life, the economy and the virus.”
To boil it all down, the most important thing a program or university can do is test for the virus, among other important safety precautions.
“The only way forward is it depends upon testing, otherwise you are going to have a lot of sick athletes and your’e going to have a lot of potentially sick coaches.”
Alabama is set to start their season on Sept. 5 against Southern California, a place that has seen a rising number of cases, in Dallas, Texas, which is considered to be one of the country’s newest hotbeds for the virus.
The NCAA announced student-athletes for spring sports will be granted a waiver for an additional season of eligibility after coronavirus.
Due to the unprecedented affects and uncertainties of the coronavirus, the NCAA shut down the balance of winter sports and cancelled all spring sports this week.
Now the NCAA has announced that student-athletes for spring sports will be granted a waiver for an additional season of eligibility.
“Council leadership agreed that eligibility relief is appropriate for all Divisiion I student-athletes who participated in spring sports,” the NCAA released in a statement. “Details of eligibility relief will be finalized at a later time. Additional issues with the NCAA rules must be addressed, and appropriate governance bodies will work through those in the coming days and weeks.”
The coronavirus is an unprecedented event and to the credit of the NCAA, took immediate and unprecedented measures. Granting the relief to student-athletes does create several logisitcal issues and costs could be substantial. With every sport having scholarship limits, the NCAA will have to elevate scholarship limits for the next four years.
And who and how will that extra year of scholarships be paid by? Most athletic programs are underwater financially and don’t have the means to fund additional scholarships. Will the NCAA step in and help fund those programs?
As for winter sports, particularly men’s and women’s basketball, the committee “will also discuss issues related to seasons of competition” for those athletes who were not able to play in conference and NCAA championships.
With the exception of women’s tennis, spring sport athletes are overwhelmingly on equivalency scholarships and thus additional seasons of playing eligibility would come with an additional cost not only to their athletic departments or the NCAA, should it finance the cost, but to the athletes and their families.
