Keith Carter: “We’re super optimistic that we’re going to play (football)”
Ole Miss athletics director Keith Carter is confident we're going to play college football this fall.
When the Southeastern Conference announced last week their decision to play a 10-game, conference-only slate beginning Sept. 26, there were some detractors. Some saw the decision to push back start dates as a way to delay the inevitable of cancelling a college football season.
However, league decision makers don't see it that way.
“Anyone that’s saying we’re just trying to find a way to delay a decision to cancel the season, it couldn’t be further from the truth," Carter told The Grove Report over the weekend. "We want to find a way to play. Our student-athletes want to play.”
Part of the SEC's decision on a conference only schedule was pushing the football start date back from the first weekend of September to the last weekend of September. Effectively, the old week four is the new week one.
How that will work is still up in the air. Athletic directors are meeting again today (Monday, Aug. 3) to work on the future schedule. Carter told us that it's more likely that they will blow up the entire old schedule to create the new, 10-game slate. More concrete news on what that will look like will come later this week.
But that delayed start date is still one of the key features to be able to play a season, the best way to actually be able to play football in the fall.
"The start date boils down to flexibility," Carter said. "For us, that was the date that we felt like allows us to have the best opportunity to play and play a full season. Also, by going to conference only, it takes out a lot of variables that come into play."
A big part of that flexibility, Carter says, comes from the return of students to campus' across the conference.
In Oxford, there's already been breakouts of COVID-19 linked to students, particularly a a set of outbreaks traced back to Ole Miss fraternity parties over the summer. Logically, these numbers can only rise when more students return to campus.
That's what the delayed start date is trying to monitor and plan for.
"We all anticipate, when our students come back to campus and 20,000 people show up in Oxford, there's going to be some spikes in cases," Carter said. " To go through and monitor that, pushing the season back into September gives us more time if a spike is to occur."
We can expect to know more about that future schedule in coming days. Will football actually happen? Are all of these conversations publicity stunts? What sort of additional measures are being put in place to protect players and coaches?
There's obviously a lot of questions to still be answered, something Carter will openly admit. Regardless, he's still confident in a fall football season in 2020.
More From The Grove Report:
July Recruiting Wrap-up: Where Does Ole Miss Stand After a Big Friday?
MoMo Sanogo Pushing Back Against SEC Return to Play Protocols
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