Mark Emmert "Very Concerned" about Fall Sports this Year
With college football fast approaching, NCAA president Mark Emmert admitted Tuesday to being “very concerned” about fall sports happening – but he said he would feel better about a delayed start or shorter season.
"We do get to see what happens when people return to campus," he told ESPN. "You get to learn a lot from what's going on with professional sports. We get to see how the testing protocols emerge and how that can be more effective, especially if we can get antigen testing going, for keeping track of the virus on campuses. The fact a delay could provide us with time to do all that could be very, very useful.”
Emmert feels comfortable about a delay or a short season because it provides longer breaks between games and flexibility around schedules.
“If you have to quarantine a team or a big chunk of a team, you've got time to do that and you've got time to adjust ... I think having fewer contests and doing them over a delayed period of time could be very, very helpful."
This comes shortly after the NCAA Board of Governors began seriously considering the possibility of cancelling fall championships. Emmert is hopeful that championships in November can happen. If they are cancelled though, then teams can still play for conference championships.
"They could play for a conference championship if they could make it safe," he said. "The determination of our championships would be about whether or not we could bring together large groups of students in these kinds of environments and do it safely.”
Emmert sees the challenge in schools traveling across the country, especially with the MLB’s Miami Marlins recent COVID-19 outbreak. “I would be shocked if as we get into fall sports in college sports that we don't have this occur,” he stated. “It's not whether someone comes down with the virus, it's what you do when it happens in my opinion."
“We have 19,000 teams across the NCAA over all three seasons, and in the fall we'll run 22 championships. The idea of making that all fit into anything that looks like normal is a challenge to say the least."
The NCAA has a lot of final decisions to make, but time is quickly running out to make them.
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