Joe Castiglione: For Football in 2020, Don't Let 'Perfect' be the Enemy of 'Good'
Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione has seen financial strife before in his athletic department. When he arrived in July 1998, the Sooners had been operating in the red for years. It was his first hurdle as AD, and it was enormous.
But whether it was 9/11 or a state energy crises, Castiglione has never encountered anything like the Coronavirus pandemic and its ensuing shutdown of America.
“This is way beyond anybody’s imagination,” Castiglione said Thursday on a 57-minute media conference call. “I was telling somebody the other day, I feel like we’re living in one of those movies that we went to watch, you know, got enthralled by the storyline and the cinematography and the drama and whatever emotions it would evoke, and then the movie would end and you got up and walked out of the theater. You realize, ‘Wow, that was quite a story, but it’s just a movie.’
“This one, we’re living day-to-day, and we still don’t know if we’re a fourth of the way through it, halfway through it, three-fourths of the way through it — we don’t know. But we’re trying to utilize everybody’s best skills.”
Castiglione last week described conversations he’s had with peers about what the shutdown might mean to college football season. Every athletic department and many universities rely on the revenue generated by football just to operate. Football funds scholarships in most other sports as well as salaries, operating expenses and a lot more.
So, Castiglione posited, football season will happen — in some iteration. That could mean a shortened season. It could mean pushing the season back until doctors give the all clear for public assembly, which could mean football in 2020 becomes a two-semester sport. Castiglione also said football could even get pushed back to kickoff after January.
Bowls in April? College Football Playoff games in May?
Talk about March Madness.
“Well, the first challenge would be getting everyone to agree,” Castiglione said. “That’s gonna be the first challenge, whatever model we choose.
“I don’t ever want this to be a conversation where we’re gonna let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good.’ We may not have a perfect solution. It might be fraught with any variety of imperfections.
“But if we keep the main things the main things — the priorities about health, safety, wellness, the ability to get student-athletes prepared to compete for whatever number of games it is that we can play, to be able to have a season that can engage as many people in the event as possible.
“Look, we all know stadiums and arenas were not built for social distancing. So in a completely different conversation, we’re trying to figure out what that could mean if we’re able to have games. Will we have moved past the point where social distancing is required? At least to the point we have it right now? I don’t have the answer to that. It’s just a hypothetical question. If so, what does the new normal look like?”
Castiglione said he’s “been in touch with national apparel manufacturers,” about the potential for “game day items” like masks, gloves, hats and bandanas, “so fans would know what they have available. Do we start to see some of them pop up in social media or other places?
“Food service, what is that gonna look like? I’ve talked to our concessionaires about that. And obviously we’re working with a concessionaire that’s national in scope. They’re talking about these very things at the pro level whenever any of the professional teams start to reengage and decide how they’re gonna come back, not just at the college level. So we’ve got all these different kinds of conversations going on.”
From adjusting seating capacities in the stadiums and arenas to adding hand sanitizer stations, Castiglione said literally everything is on the table.
“Some of it’s going to create anything from an inconvenience to maybe a reason why people would question if they’re ready to come back to the stadium or venue or not,” he said. “But we’re letting all the creativity flow as best we can, and then (trying to) organize it in such a fashion that the more likely possibilities could be addressed quicker than some of the other ones.”
Castiglione noted that it has been exactly one month since the Big 12 Tournaments were shut down, and described how much things have changed in that time.
Asked what his biggest challenge has been so far, he hesitated, then opened up.
“As I think about any number of items we’ve had to face in the last month, at certain points in time I thought maybe that particular decision would have been the most difficult,” he said.
“But standing in front of student-athletes and having to explain to them that their season was over immediately — the abrupt nature of that. Because of the world we’re in and the pure emotion of what we do and how everybody works so hard, not just preparing for that season, but a single season could be the culmination of work of many seasons. And just to have to stand in front of them and explain it’s over … that was tough. Because I empathize with our student-athletes and our coaches and our staff, everybody that just had to deal with the shock of that news. Even though we all knew that was the right choice given the magnitude of what we were dealing with.”
Emotionally, Castiglione probably won’t have to cross that bridge again.
Unless, of course, football season never happens. If that dark future unfolds, he may be telling some student-athletes that their sports have been suspended or even discontinued.
But logistically, pushing into the spring a sport that has been, for 150 years now, played strictly in the fall, the greatest challenges lie ahead.
“Again, it could flow a lot of different directions, a lot of hypothetical equations there,” Castiglione said. “And a lot of ideas that may or may not come to fruition. But we’re throwing them all out there so that we can tap into the best practices when necessary.
“So we’ll just have to see. Again, stay positive. Hopefully we’re not having to do something to drastic, but we’ll adjust as the medical experts say we can.”
Castiglione also noted Thursday’s news of a 10 percent national unemployment rate and cautioned that trying to plan financially in these uncertain times could be fruitless, especially for the routine tasks of asking for help from ticket holders and donors. He said there is currently a 70 percent renewal rate on 2020 season tickets, but said there was no way yet to predict what the other 30 percent would decide.
“It’s a moving target,” he said. At minimum it’s gonna impact us in a noticeable way.”
“I think we’re gonna come out of this stronger,” he added. “Usually when we have these kinds of things, it reveals a very special, innate emotion in every one of us, that we want to help that other person.”
To get the latest OU posts as they happen, join the SI Sooners Community by clicking “Follow” at the top right corner of the page (mobile users can click the notifications bell icon), and follow SI Sooners on Twitter @All_Sooners.
