Hubris got the best of Florida and the SEC three weeks into its schedule, with cancelations of two games due to positive coronavirus tests.
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The worst fears of every program around the country this season were realized at the University of Florida this week.
After 21 football players tested positive for COVID-19, the school paused all football operations and postponed the team’s game against LSU, previously scheduled to take place this Saturday.
Now, Florida’s game against Missouri next weekend is in serious doubt, as well. And we’re left wondering, who could possibly have seen this coming?
I don’t mean to be smug. It isn’t productive to pull an “I-told-you-so” in the middle of a global pandemic that has cost over 200,000 lives in the United States alone.
But when the strategy from the get-go was to have players, many of whom are living on campus and frequently interacting with other students, travel weekly across state lines to play a contact sport against nearly 100 other players who have been doing the exact same thing, it’s not hard to imagine where that will lead.
In my column on June 12 about the NCAA’s return-to-play plan, I posed a hypothetical scenario.
What if there are mid-season outbreaks?
Allow me to paint a hypothetical picture for you. It’s Oct. 24, 2020. The Florida Gators are enjoying their bye week before a matchup against Georgia to decide the SEC East when disaster strikes. A significant portion of players on the team — say, more than a third — come in contact with an infected person(s) and are now testing positive.
What does Florida do in that situation? Surely, its players (even ones who are testing negative) can no longer travel, right? Certainly, they can no longer play a contact sport against those who haven’t been exposed while tangentially exposing hundreds, or even thousands, of other people in the process, no?
Now, this hypothetical is reality (albeit, about a week off). And Florida’s not the only one.
Vanderbilt canceled its game this weekend against Missouri, as well, citing an increase in positive cases on the team.
In his announcement of the postponement of the LSU game, UF Athletic Director Scott Stricklin said that the league set up its schedule with these situations in mind.
Every school has an open date on Dec. 12, the weekend before the SEC Championship Game, that can be used for rescheduling games due to COVID-19. The LSU game has been tentatively scheduled for this date.
But if the Gators also had to make up their game against Missouri, that process would be much murkier. Assuming there is no change to the date of the SEC Championship, that game could potentially be rescheduled to the middle of the week, depending on its significance in the SEC East division race.
Florida isn’t exactly dead in the water. Perhaps it’s able to resume play in a decently timely manner. But it’s entirely possible at this point that its season could be in jeopardy.
For a while, it seemed the team was doing relatively well at managing the spread of the virus. But as so many of us predicted, a single road trip was enough to change that. Now, it’s all up in the air.
And this was the risk that college football administrators knew they’d be taking by playing football this fall. If they took these events into account in their risk/reward calculus, then so be it.
But don’t let any of them tell you they didn’t know this would happen.
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