Lincoln Riley: 'We got a shot' at playing Saturday, but there are numerous roadblocks
Oklahoma has been as diligent about COVID-19 safeguards as any college football team in the country.
But something happened last week, and the Sooners couldn’t play their game at West Virginia.
Now, with a home game looming Saturday against Baylor, OU coach Lincoln Riley said he is neither optimistic or pessimistic that his team will play the Bears.
“We got a shot,” Riley said Monday during the Big 12 coaches teleconference. “We’ll see.”
The way Riley sees it, the Sooners face two massive roadblocks:
One, the facility was shut down for five days last week. The players did nothing at all. Everything opened up on Monday, but in terms of practice, strength and fitness and being in the right frame of mind to play a football game, last week wasn’t a routine open date. It was a complete and total shutdown.
“Having your entire facility, operation, everything shut down for five days, that’s a big deal,” Riley said. “That’s five days that you’re not on the field, not working. So I still think it’s something we can absolutely overcome, but obviously, having a great week all the way around from today on is gonna be critical for us.”
And two, the shutdown wasn’t because of contact tracing that turned out to be harmless. OU actually had a number of positive tests, Riley said, and that means there are players who won’t be available for the Baylor game.
Now, for the first time as a coach, he has to figure out how many days of practice the team actually needs, how many players on the field constitute a “team” and how many players he might get back throughout the week. It’s an unprecedented calculus that he and his coaching staff must decipher before kicking off Saturday night.
“Yeah, it’s definitely a concern, or something we may have to work through,” Riley said. “It’s hard to say. It’s a little different in this scenario just because the previous five days, we’ve been allowed to do nothing. It’d be different had we — even with limited numbers — been able to practice the last week, or do something this last weekend.
“But hopefully we can get some of these guys back on the field here tonight and see where we’re at. But it’s gonna be a day-to-day thing. I know our team wants to play. There’s no question about that. But we’ve got to get to a point where obviously we have enough guys and it’s safe.”
If Oklahoma wins its final two games, it locks down a spot in the Big 12 Championship Game on Dec. 19 against Iowa State. But if the Sooners don’t get to play their final two games, they might not meet the minimum number of games for participating in the title game (teams must be within one game of playing the league average; if everyone else plays 9, then OU must play at least 8 games; if the league average is 8.5, that gets rounded up to 9 and OU must play at least 8. If the league average is below 8.5, that gets rounded down to 8 and OU would meet the minimum since the Sooners are currently at 7 games).
Then there’s the prospect of going into a game without a full roster, or without their best players — and losing. Baylor is coming off a game on Saturday in which the Bears had their best performance of the season in a 32-31 win over Kansas State. A loss to the Bears throws any plans for a sixth consecutive coronation party in the waste basket.
Riley said nothing changed on his end. After beating Oklahoma State on Nov. 21, he reminded the players — again — to avoid large gatherings and wear masks and wash their hands, just like he has been doing since summer.
“No, messaging wasn’t different,” he said. “We’ve known from the beginning this is gonna be a marathon, not a sprint. That there was gonna be no scenario that came up where it was gonna be acceptable to get away from our COVID precautions. So I reminded the team, like we have after every single game, whether it’s been on the road, home, win, lose, I mean, there’s not a day that goes by in this facility that our players (and) staff aren’t constantly reminded about that.
“It’s so hard to say (why positives spiked) just because you don’t know exactly where the stuff originated. I mean, we’ve stuck to our protocol throughout the year — players, staff everybody. We didn’t really change anything, haven’t lessened anything. So that’s the hard thing with this, especially with guys on college campuses, I mean it can originate so many places and it doesn’t take much to, you know, for it to really spread. It can just happen so quickly.
“So that’s the hard thing, is you don’t have all the answers. So obviously when they went up, our answer was to shut our facility down for five days, which we have. This morning, after (rapid) testing this morning, we finally got back in the facility. Hopefully we can put together a whole week and keep some guys on the right side of this and be able to play on Saturday.”
Riley said he couldn’t even accurately gauge his team’s mentality about being shut down and now returning to work with a game coming up in five days.
“Hard to say,” he said. “I hadn’t seen ‘em in six days. So we’ll see.”
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