Is a tectonic change coming to college sports?

[GooooMarquette]

Well, I also cited soccer, college football and NFL training camps, not just baseball. And NFL players are being tested daily and here we are, six days after the season opener and about 72 hours after most teams played, and there have been no reports of related infections. (This, of course, could change).

LSU had an outbreak of 30 or more football players getting the virus last June after many of the players visited the Tigerland bars near campus.

https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/sports/college/lsu/2020/09/16/lsu-football-covid-spike-happened-socially-coach-orgeron-honest-to-a-fault/5816165002/

As for right or wrong, I guess that depends on how one wants to judge. I think we both can agree that infections are possible, if not likely. But I wouldn't say playing was the wrong decision if infections occur. You may disagree.

I agree that soccer and college and pro football are better comparators. However, as you indicated, it is still early so the verdict is still out on whether they are a success or failure.

As for whether they could keep playing if infections occur, I think it depends on the speed and accuracy of the testing. If they truly have a highly sensitive test and can show that nobody else was exposed, it would seem reasonable to play. If they don’t, I think continuing would be a mistake.

And we have seen plenty of companies roll out tests that seem promising, but ultimately prove to be less reliable than advertised....

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

To be perfectly honest, I feel way more comfortable with sports moving forward now than I did six weeks ago.  You don't need a bubble to make it work.  You need to take precautions, test, quarantine and isolate.  But you can move forward.

[The Big East]

PAC-12 Making Progress

https://www.deseret.com/sports/2020/9/16/21438814/utah-utes-football-pac-12-rapid-testing-gavin-newsom-kate-brown-larry-scott

[The Lens]

To be perfectly honest, I feel way more comfortable with sports moving forward now than I did six weeks ago.  You don't need a bubble to make it work.  You need to take precautions, test, quarantine and isolate.  But you can move forward.

College Football might be easier than NFL or even the MLB. 

You can cohort a non bubble college team and insist they don't socialize.  NFL players with have kids, especially school aged kids have the potential for much for interaction.

[GooooMarquette]

I think it's cool that rapid testing seems to be evolving to the point that it might be possible to safely play team sports...but I also wonder why it isn't more widely available for the rest of us.

Seems like the first places rapid tests should go would be hospitals and other first responders, nursing facilities, schools...with any leftover capacity to entertainers.

But I gue$$ money talk$....

[MU82]

Interesting stuff on one-year COVID eligibility exception and future transfers from Seth Davis in The Athletic ...

In an era where players don’t stay in college any longer than they have to, Wisconsin is proffering a unique look: an all-senior starting lineup. That’s a great asset, but it also comes with a painful flip side because it means the program will have to replace all of those starters next season.

At least, that’s how it works in normal times. But these, of course, are not normal times. In October, the NCAA’s Division I Council granted all winter athletes an additional season of competition. The change, which was also extended to spring and fall sports, was made to give athletes breathing room if they wanted to opt out of their seasons because of the COVID-19 pandemic. To sweeten the deal, the NCAA mandated that if seniors return to their current schools next season, they will not count against that program’s scholarship limit.

In other words, Wisconsin and every other school might not have to replace its seniors, after all. And it’s not just seniors who can take advantage. Every player in the country, regardless of class, is getting an additional year. “I told our guys, you’re all redshirting and none of you are redshirting,” Wisconsin coach Greg Gard says. “I haven’t really talked with our seniors about it yet, but I’ve already been told by our administration that we can go over the (scholarship) limit if they want to come back. So when the time comes, they’ll have a choice to make.”

The quirky, one-time rule is one of several forces that are converging to produce a veritable Rostergeddeon that is about to overtake college basketball. Most of those forces were already in motion before the pandemic hit. With that extra dose of acceleration, the sport is bracing for a perfect storm of upheaval. To wit:

• Traditionally, every sport has allowed their athletes to transfer one time without having to sit out a redshirt year. The exceptions to that rule have been basketball (men’s and women’s), football, baseball and men’s ice hockey. Next month the Division I Council is expected to bring those sports in line with everyone else. Basketball players will still be allowed to transfer more than once, but if they do they’ll have to sit out a year on the second transfer. For years, the coaches have been vehemently against offering this onetime exception, but there was no way the NCAA can continue justifying the unequal treatment. Hence, the impending seismic vote.

• Several years ago, the NCAA, no doubt acting on good intentions, offered a process where transfers could ask for a waiver from having to sit out a year if they could demonstrate that they or someone in their immediate family suffered from a debilitating injury or illness. Not surprisingly, hundreds of players (and their new coaches) stretched the definitions of “debilitating” and “immediate” in hopes of exploiting this loophole. Because there was no downside to getting rejected, the number of requests increased every year. That severely strained the NCAA’s staff and led to complaints about unfair treatment. It also became moot when the COVID-19 pandemic led the NCAA to grant 85 percent of waiver requests for this season.

Combine all that with next month’s anticipated change and you have the Division I Council’s decision last Wednesday to grant a blanket waiver to any transfer who was supposed to sit out this season. Thus, a couple of dozen teams were immediately able to suit up players they thought wouldn’t be eligible until the fall of 2021.

• The extra year adjustment passed in October could also tip the balance on decisions involving medical redshirts. Several coaches have told me they have injured players who in normal times would sit out all season, because as soon as they step foot in a game they’ve burned a year of eligibility. Now those injured players will be far more inclined to rejoin their teams down the stretch of the regular season.

• We are also seeing an acceleration of another trend: the in-season addition of a reclassified high school senior. Reclassification has been increasing the last few years with respect to fall-enrolled freshmen. Most of the time, these are players who were held back a year or went to prep school, so their reclassification just put them in their regular age group. But now there are more cases where a high school junior loads up his academics so he can join a college program a year earlier than planned. That now includes in-season reclassifications like the one that allowed Ben Gregg, a 6-10 forward from Oregon, to finish up high school and join Gonzaga last week. USC likewise added Reese Waters, a four-star point guard from California who originally was supposed to graduate next spring. DePaul, LSU, Maryland, Ohio State and Wake Forest added reclassified high school seniors as well.

Once a trend like this gets going, it’s awfully hard to stop, especially in an environment where the NCAA is loathe to do anything that further restricts an athlete’s ability to exploit opportunities.

The upshot of all this is we probably will see a considerable spike in the number of players who transfer next spring. According to Stadium’s Jeff Goodman, who has tracked the transfer wire closely for several years, around 900 players switched Division I schools last year, up from around 500 in 2013. No doubt that will lead to a lot of caterwauling from coaches, but that’s only because they are thinking about the players they might lose as opposed to the ones they might add.

If any group suffers from this spike, it will be high school players. It’s a lot more efficient for coaches to spend a few weeks recruiting players out of the transfer portal than it is to chase high school guys around the grassroots circuit for several years with no guarantee of success. It’s easier to evaluate transfers because they have more playing experience, and because they can only switch schools once without having to sit out, a transfer is less likely to bolt for another school if he’s unhappy with his role or his minutes.

And so the perfect storm gathers. A lot of uncertainty is ahead, but the one thing we know for sure is that the rosters, they are a-changing. When the season ends, the madness will begin.

[The Big East]

The big beneficiary of these changes will be the lower D1 Programs.  There will be high school players and transfers who do not want to sit on the bench at higher level programs and will opt to play at the lower tier programs. D2 will similarly benefit.

This is going to make scheduling cupcakes very interesting.