The Big Ten and Pac-12 won’t play football this fall because of
concerns about COVID-19, taking two of college football’s five
power conferences out of a crumbling season amid the pandemic.
About an hour after the Big Ten’s announcement, the Pac-12 called a
news conference to say its season would be postponed until the
spring.
The Big Ten’s announcement comes six days after the conference that
includes historic programs such as Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska
and Penn State had released a revised conference-only football
schedule that it hoped would help it navigate a fall season with
potential COVID-19 disruptions.
Instead, all fall sports in the Big Ten have been called off and a
spring season will be explored.
The decision was monumental but not a surprise. Speculation has run
rampant for several days that the Big Ten was moving toward this
decision. On Monday, coaches throughout the conference tried to
push back the tide, publicly pleading for more time and threatening
to look elsewhere for games this fall.
”The mental and physical health and welfare of our
student-athletes has been at the center of every decision we have
made regarding the ability to proceed forward,” Big Ten
Commissioner Kevin Warren said in a statement. ”As time progressed
and after hours of discussion with our Big Ten Task Force for
Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Big Ten Sports Medicine
Committee, it became abundantly clear that there was too much
uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our
student-athletes to compete this fall.”
Warren took over as commissioner from Jim Delany at the start of
this year. A former longtime executive in the NFL, Warren walked
into an unprecedented problem for college sports.
During an interview on the Big Ten Network, Warren was pressed on
whether the decision was unanimous across the conferences and if
Big Ten teams could still try to play a fall season, as some
coaches suggested Monday.
Warren declined to answer.
”We are very disappointed in the decision by the Big Ten
Conference to postpone the fall football season, as we have been
and continue to be ready to play,” University of Nebraska
leadership said in a statement.
Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said the Buckeyes would
have preferred to play.
”I wish we would have had a little more time to evaluate,” Smith
told Big Ten Network.
Over the last month, conferences have been reworking schedules in
the hopes of being able to buy some time and play a season. The Big
Ten was the first to go to conference-only play, doing it in early
July.
The Pac-12 followed two days later and eventually all the Power
Five conferences switched to either all conference play or mostly.
The first FBS conference to pull the plug on a fall season was the
Mid-American Conference on Saturday, and then the Mountain West did
the same on Monday.
But those conferences don’t have the revenue, reach and history of
the Big Ten, which seemed positioned to pour resources into trying
to protect their athletes from getting and spreading COVID-19.
The Big Ten touts itself as the oldest college athletic conference
in the country, dating back to 1896 when it was called the Western
Conference, and its schools have been playing football ever since.
It became the Big Ten in 1918 and grew into a football powerhouse.
The 14 Big Ten schools span from Maryland and Rutgers on the East
Coast to Iowa and Nebraska out west. Not only has it been one of
the most successful conferences on the field but off the field it
has become one of the wealthiest.
The Big Ten, with its lucrative television network, distributes
about $50 million per year to its members.
The Pac-12’s members are in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon,
Utah and Washington.
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08-11-2020 13:29:13
