Mullen has started strong in his UF head coach tenure but he may need to win the SEC this season in order to jump to “untouchable” status.
Job security is a fickle thing. Coaches can go from comfortable to the hot seat and back within the course of a single season (see Auburn’s Gus Malzahn). Coaches can go from winning back-to-back division titles to getting fired midseason (isn’t that neat?).
So, after two successful seasons in Gainesville which resulted in New Year’s Six Bowl titles, how safe is coach Dan Mullen’s job?
According to CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd, he’s among the safest in the country. Dodd rated every coach’s security on a five-point scale ranging from “0” or “untouchable” to “5” or “win or be fired.”
Mullen was labeled a “1” meaning his job is safe and secure, one of 43 FBS coaches in that category. He hasn’t proven enough to Dodd to be considered “untouchable” by Dodd like conference contemporaries Nick Saban and Kirby Smart. Nearly all of the 24 “untouchable” coaches are coaches that either just got hired this past offseason or are long-tenured coaches who have won conference titles.
Though Mullen has had a strong start to his UF head coaching career, he may need to win the SEC (or at least the SEC East) this season in order to make the jump from “safe and secure” to “untouchable.”
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.
