With the Tuesday decisions of the Big Ten and the Pac-12 to forego their 2020 football seasons in hope of a postponement to the spring of 2021, the next thing to do was to wait and see what the remaining Big 5 conferences — the SEC, the ACC, and the Big 12 — would decide in response. Administrators from all five conferences have been discussing the pros and cons of a “regular” season in a time where there is no new normal, but at least for the time being, the SEC and the ACC have decided to stand pat and hope for the best in 2020.
From the SEC:
Statement from @SEC Commissioner @GregSankey pic.twitter.com/8nyweGPBk1
— Southeastern Conference (@SEC) August 11, 2020
From the ACC:
Statement from the ACC: pic.twitter.com/9lBY5h8jNy
— The ACC (@theACC) August 11, 2020
The statements came out virtually at the same time, and just a coupe hours after the Pac-12 followed the Big Ten’s example. What is meant in the SEC’s statement by a “thorough and deliberate effort,” and what the ACC means by “the safety of our students, staff, and overall campus communities will always be our top priority” is open to interpretation, but here we are.
So now, we have two conferences opting out on one side, and two more conferences deciding to leave things open on the other, with the Big 12 as a sort of tiebreaker whenever that conference makes its decision. Certainly the SEC, as the most powerful of the conferences in a competitive sense, and the ACC, with its own major member schools and Notre Dame as part of its conference schedule, would have no issue grabbing major ratings with conference-only schedules, or some sort of competitive agreement between the two conferences (and perhaps the Big 12, depending on what the Big 12 does).
In its recent medical report, the ACC listed the following factors as game discontinuation considerations:
- Inability to isolate new positive cases, or to quarantine high contact risk cases of the traveling and home team University students.
- Unavailability or inability to perform symptomatic, surveillance or precompetition testing as required.
- Campus-wide or local community transmission rates that are considered unsafe by local public health officials.
- Inability to perform adequate contact tracing consistent with governmental requirements or recommendations.
- Local public health officials of the home team state that there is an inability for the hospital infrastructure to accommodate a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations.
Both conferences have schools in hotspot states, and there are varying degrees of taking the virus seriously from state to state, especially in the Southeast, so while the relatively cavalier attitude concerning more immediate competition does not come as a surprise, one can only hope that the two conferences are not hoisted on their own collective petards as a result.
Sadly, in a more general sense, such “ready-fire-aim” thinking regarding COVID-19 has generally led to tragedy.
