Lincoln Riley Zoom Call: 'I Hope Like Hell We Can Play in the Fall'
Lincoln Riley is confident there will be a college football season in 2020.
When SI Sooners asked Riley Thursday during a 33-minute video call with media, the always-positive Riley sounded a little less confident than he has previously.
“Oh, I still think we have a really good chance of it,” Riley said. “Now, there’s not 100 percent right now. I mean, things are changing so quickly.”
OU football players reported this week for voluntary offseason workouts, and sessions began Wednesday. The Sooners open the season on Sept. 5 against Missouri State, host Tennessee on Sept. 12, and face a road trip to Army on Sept. 26, before beginning Big 12 Conference play on Oct. 5.
At least, that’s what the schedule says as the calendar turns to July.
“I mean, if you’d asked everybody three weeks or a month ago, everybody probably would have said 100 percent, and now that these numbers have surged, that’s created some more doubt in peoples’ minds, and understandably so,” Riley said.
Riley acknowledged that he’s not paid to worry about when games are being played or even if games are being played. He just has to be prepared to play them.
“I don't sit back and worry about, honestly, if we’re playing, who we’re playing,” he said. “My job is to get this team ready and ready for anything that comes our way, whether it’s rescheduling games, whether it’s playing all the games, whether it’s only playing conference games.
“I mean, this season is gonna be unlike any other, so we’ve got to prepare our team that way. So in some ways, the preparation of your team is different, but I don't know that, for us, right now, it’s not a sit around in the staff room — with our mask on — and debate, ‘Are we gonna play this game, are we gonna play that game?’ We'll have to deal with some of those things as they come up.
“And I know everybody wants to know, and of course, we would love to know, too. But at the same time, we're not gonna know, and we're not gonna know, probably week-to-week we're not gonna know. So we've just got to let it play out.
“Hopefully our country will respond in a way that I think we all hope it will, and we can get these numbers down and make it safe for players, staff, fans, everybody, and have football. But we've all certainly gotta be ready to adjust.”
Riley also got a question about the likelihood of splitting the season into two semesters, or moving the college football season entirely to the spring.
“Everybody has a different opinion on this, but I personally think (it’s possible),” he said. “I know it died out on the national scene. But I think our leadership among conferences and ADs have still been continuing to work on different models for the season because it is just so unpredictable.
“I know the spring was one of the models that they continued to work on. There’s a lot of news out there that to the average person would sit back and say there are points to that that make sense.
“Like I said, I hope like hell we can play in the fall and do it as close as to how we’ve done it before. If we can do that, then I’m all for it. That’s the best option.”
Riley explained how some expectations have changed as more informations is revealed about the Coronavirus and the effects of COVID-19.
“We’ve seen with, at least right now, the hot weather doesn’t really affect this thing that much like we kind of hoped it would,” he said. “We’ve heard reports from some of our nation’s medical leaders that there’s — again, these are all potential things — potential chance for a vaccine by the end of this year, possibly early next year.
“There are some positive things, some of the treatments they’re starting to develop that obviously would have an impact on players, staff, fans, everybody. Then, to me, it just becomes do you think it’s doable? I personally do. There are differing opinions on that.
“I don’t believe you could play a full season (in the spring). It would probably be a conference season, postseason only. We’ve seen often teams go play well into January in the College Football Playoff and start spring practice sometime in February and nobody says a word about that.
“I do believe you’d have to adjust your schedule in the season, adjust your schedule to give your players plenty of time off to get their bodies back and all of that during the summer. Maybe even have a little later start date next fall.
“I think the people who say it’s not doable are, in my opinion, just don’t want to think about it. I think it would be wrong of us to take any potential option off the table right now. I think it would be very difficult to say the spring is not a potential option. I, for one, believe it’s very doable.”
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