After canceling the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament Thursday morning, league commissioner Greg Sankey held a news conference Thursday afternoon inside Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena and firmly announced the cancellations of the upcoming SEC gymnastics and equestrian championships.
So where does SEC spring football stand in this world of shuttered sporting events from professional to high school levels due to concerns regarding the novel coronavirus?
As of Thursday night, it was still in existence while every spring sport within the league has been suspended until March 30 and had its NCAA championship canceled. Tennessee held a closed workout Thursday afternoon, its second practice of the spring, and Alabama is scheduled to begin its 14th spring under Nick Saban on Friday.
“What we’ve said is that the presidents/chancellors level will delegate authority to our athletic directors to make some of these operational decisions,” Sankey said. “We’re not all at the destinations at this time, and we may not govern every one of those elements. In fact, the NCAA may need to engage and quickly govern some of those elements.”
Auburn and Florida were scheduled to start spring practice Monday, but Auburn announced Thursday night that it will postpone its start. Georgia is set to begin Tuesday.
Spring football not only involves the 15 practices allotted by the NCAA but spring games that have grown in stature since Saban took over in Tuscaloosa. The SEC announced Wednesday night that the basketball tournament and spring sports would have restricted attendance before those plans were revised, but the league has yet to implement a strategy for spring football games.
Georgia’s first G-Day contest under Kirby Smart in 2016 set a league record with 93,000 fans.
“We’ve limited the size, clearly, of on-campus events, and our campuses are doing that individually,” Sankey said. “I don’t have a prescriptive list right now around what’s going to happen with spring practice and spring football.”
The SEC has taken the stance of suspending all on-campus and off-campus football recruiting for the remainder of March.
In other words, all sports related activities, including recruiting, have been shut down — except for spring practice. Which is kind of interesting, no?
Georgia is leaving this up to its head coach.
While the spread of the coronavirus in the United States is having a major affect on sports all over the country, it’s not hampering Georgia football as of now. According to J. Reid Parker Director of Athletics Greg McGarity, who spoke with Dawgs247 via telephone, the Bulldogs are permitted to resume on-campus practices as usual. That means that as of right now, UGA will begin spring football practice on March 17.
McGarity says the decision is ultimately up to Kirby Smart on whether he wants to suspend the start of spring drills or not and the two have not yet spoken or come to a decision on that.
Now, that was said before the school reversed course and announced classes would be closed until month’s end, so I don’t know if that would change the calculus behind spring practice or not. But if the powers that be find it prudent to keep students away from Athens for the time being, what’s the rationale for spring practice? Here’s a quote from McGarity ($$) about that:
“Some of the discussion centered around it may provide a more quarantined environment if you’ve got these individuals together,” McGarity said. “So there’s different levels of concern. I know all the medical staffs on each campus are certainly in tune with this issue, and they’ll be monitoring like they have been. So I think all these things come into play. But right now schools are able to practice as they desire.”
How that’s any different from, say, letting basketball teams play a tournament inside an empty arena, is something I can’t explain. Nor does it sound like something Sankey or McGarity can, either. But there it is.
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UPDATE: Things changed.
I’ve got to say that, as a sports fan, this has been the most “life comes at you fast” week of my life.
Get The Picture 
One way it’s different is the lack of travel. When the bball teams are traveling, even if they charter a flight they are staying in hotels and living in a different city. Living in their apt/dorm room is a more controlled environment particularly when students are not around campus.
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Agreed. I think authorities are taking a one size fits all approach to this as they normally do. These athletes are under virtually no risk of having serious health complications. The team is also a finite group that can arrange their behavior so that the risk of spreading to anyone outside the team would be minimal. They can safely practice if a modicum of thought is put into a plan.
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Yeah, I tend to agree. I guess the question is whether the players can be adults about their own personal athletic dorm quarantine and confine their life to one of going to and from practice and their dorm/apartment and only see each other.
I said yesterday, the college situation is tricky. Depending on how micro you go on the small group level within the campus eco-system, the situation is not all that different from a large family. And don’t we use that cliche’ about college life anyway–rah rahh rahh etc. In some ways, one-size-fits-all bans on campus stuff feels like banning an ordinary person from both work AND FROM home. The campus is where many of them both live and work. Ok, shall I go to Mars then ? Not everybody can just go eat cereal and watch the Price is Right at mom’s house in Atlanta. (and what if Mom is in the at-risk group)
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Or Grandma?
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We can finally bury this ridiculous student-athlete ruse and call bullshit on all those who hide behind it to deny players benefits if spring practice goes on.
The USG ordered all system schools to close and all students to vacate campuses. If football players don’t vacate, they ain’t students.
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Includes workouts?
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No surprise of the lack of leadership and backbone McGarity is showing, and leaving it up to Kirby. It is the right call to cancel all sport activities at this time, and practice social distancing to try and flatten the curve of new cases. The worst thing to happen is for at risk populations to get this all at the same time and having to resource allocate who gets ventilators and who dies. Sometimes forward thinking and making hard decisions is necessary and not surprised that another Swing and Miss from McGarity
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I’m not shy about blaming McGarity when it’s justified, but he deserves a little slack here. It’s uncharted territory and it’s moving at a crazy pace. I’d be careful about making decisions, too.
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Uncharted territory for sure. If the team was fully locked down, with staff, it could be ok. But someone will go lick a flag pole…that’s often the issue.
Which brings up a thought, I guess quarantining the team and staff together for 3 weeks would be a violation of coaching time. But it would be good team building and support
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“But someone will go lick a flag pole…”
Chuckle. We need signs! ABSOLUTELY NO FLAG POLE LICKING!!!!
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I guess this quote just rubbed me the wrong way
“McGarity says the decision is ultimately up to Kirby Smart on whether he wants to suspend the start of spring drills or not”
Just seems like leaders step up and lead, and athletic directors should be the leaders of athletics.
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I’m gonna jump on the bash McGarity bandwagon for a minute here. This part had me shaking my head.
“McGarity says the decision is ultimately up to Kirby Smart on whether he wants to suspend the start of spring drills or not and the two have not yet spoken or come to a decision on that.”
First, passing the buck to Kirby when McGarity is (supposedly) the man in charge is ridiculous. Plus it’s not like Kirby is a medical expert either. If McGarity had said “we’re going to follow the recommendations of our medical staff” at least that would be defensible. Secondly, the fact that the start of spring practice was less than a week away and he hadn’t even spoken to Kirby about this issue seems crazy to me. What the hell are they even paying McGarity for? I know, I know, the reserve fund.
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Even if you haven’t talked to Kirby Smart, why the hell would you ever admit that. And why the hell wouldn’t you say the doctors are guiding this, even if that was only half true.
I don’t pretend to be smart at all, but Greg McGarity and some of his boomer cohort better thank their lucky stars. After folks see for years how good ole boys with more connections than brains muck stuff up, regular idiots like me will never get such high paying jobs again. Like in Casino when Joe Pesce said, “this is the last time they let street guys like us ever touch something this____ing big.”
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It’s a moot point – based on the Update to the post – but aren’t practice durations and guidelines different when school is out. Seemed like an opportunity for MOAR practice.
Also, I sure hope I’m right in my feeling that this is all WAY overblown. I understand telling 93000 folks not to show up, but canceling practice altogether?? They sent kids away from conf champs for indoor track yesterday. They were at the meet getting warmed up…
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This was my thought too. If school isn’t in session the 20hrs/week rule is not in effect.
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I’d much rather shut everything down for the rest of March–then see where we stand, in terms of new COVID infections, hoping the spread of the virus will have greatly diminished–than continue with the uncertainties of the past few dsys.
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An operational pause was really needed. If only to reassess
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This entire shutdown thing is waaay out of hand. What do people think a couple weeks will change? A workable vaccine won’t be viable until AT LEAST late next year and that depends on how human trials go that haven’t even started yet.
Country has lost its damn mind. In a couple weeks time everything will reopen and everyone will say “Why the fuck did we shut down for?”.
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If the course of the virus is around 14 days, then limiting opportunities for transmission for 14 days should stop the spread significantly.Right? I’m thinking that is the logic behind the timetable.
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It slows the spread, which allows the medical system to keep up. This isn’t going to change the total number that get infected, but it could very well reduce the number of severe cases and deaths because people will be able to get the care they need instead of facing a fully emergency room and no hospital beds.
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^^^THIS^^^
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I don’t think so.
In a few weeks everyone will say “see it worked” regardless of whether it was overblown or not.
If you halt all driving traffic fatalities will assuredly decrease, but that doesn’t make the decision to do so rational nor does it make the policy tenable.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my attorney once where he was advising me on limiting my business liability exposure. At one point I asked him if the most fail-safe policy might be to just shut my business down entirely, thus eliminating all risk of lawsuit.
He didn’t answer, except to say “my job is to protect you”.
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Traffic accidents are not a virus. Bad analogy
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Other viruses are not corona. Eliminate analogies altogether!
If you can’t understand that limiting opportunities also limits the consequences that flow therefrom, then the problem is with you not the analogy.
If we were all hermits there would be no problem here. But we’re not.
Hence, the idea is to pretend, for a bit, that we are.
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Wow you took your bad analogy and turned it around that I’m the problem. You really are a special case.
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Yes. Limiting the unnecessary social activities would help greatly. Somethings can just simply wait.
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It’s about dampening the rise in infection, to give our healthcare system time to keep pace. Surely to God you do realize this will be lasting months, not weeks?
Go watch the recent Joe Rogan podcast with the infectious disease expert to understand what’s ahead.
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I tend to agree with you. I will say this though: it’s not going to last months IF we’re still flying blind because they haven’t rapidly increased testing capabilities. Folks aren’t going to just lock all of life down and perpetually accept “we don’t know how bad it is.” At some point, the testing is going to have to show how bad it is (even if its just the healthy 20 yr old with mild flu symptoms) or people’s friends are going to have to start dropping like flies.
We absolutely should do our civic duty until the testing capability catches up. Just pray to god it does, because that’s the only way we can have any idea just how severe the situation is. People aren’t going to quarantine on a mystery forever.
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It continues to rely on testing getting done in time to get a good idea what to do next. Nothing will be cured, we only are trying to increase the odds that more people will live. Roche just has a “fast test” just approved by the FDA yesterday. We won’t know how accurate it is until we test large groups, even though it gives faster results. If we discover the rate of infection is such that we can plan from here on out how to reduce it’s overall affect on our population, well and good. If it’s past the tipping point to get ahead of the infection rate, then we will quarantine longer, etc.
TB, your last para is spot on to appeal to our sense of civic responsibility when listening to our health professionals to get through this in the best manner we can.
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So we dont have 1 million cases at once.
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You might want to do some research. Countries that have taken drastic measures have typically slowed the spread. But you go ahead and ignore what the medical field is telling folks – you obviously know better.
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When this is over all these people who canceled these events will look like idiots. They are lemmings diving off a cliff because the other lemmings all are.
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My money is on Mayor looking like the idiot. Your YMMV, as the Senator says…
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Yeah, I don’t know why exhibiting an abundance of caution for the sake of public health — at the direction of infectious disease experts — is going to make administrators “look like idiots”.
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If I do it won’t be the first time. ☺️
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I think spectators will survive. Maybe we can spend quality time with family doing positive things
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“Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate” -M. Leavitt
If I were making a decision today, I’d rather be mocked for doing too much than shamed for doing to little.
Hospitals have a finite capacity for handling respiratory distress. Overload that, and you end up where Italy is, having to choose who gets the ventilator and who doesn’t. Battlefield medicine.
It would seriously help if we had 100,000 test results to help map where this thing is spreading most rapidly and where it isn’t. But we don’t, so that question mark looms a lot larger than it otherwise would.
The learning curve here is going to be steep. And yes, hindsight is going to make some precautions look silly as well as some things that seemed perfectly safe at the time.
Chill, try to help out, let’s work together to get a handle on this thing.
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Your posts have been the only voice of reason on here. I’ve spent my life in healthcare and I’m still bewildered at how clueless the American population is when it comes to the health system. Magical thinking aside, we don’t have tests locally, PPE is being rationed (all made in China), a large well-equipped facility can probably absorb 15 sick patients on isolation in need of respiratory intervention. That’s it. Further, for the love of all things holy, please stop confusing mortality with MORBIDITY. If you’re going to die, I can’t change that. If you’re going to be sick and cause others to die, I’d rather avoid that.
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Thanks.
Tom Nichols’s The Death of Expertise reads like prophecy at the moment.
It’s not hard to find quality information. You just have to take off the blinders.
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They finally move G-Day away from the Masters, I win the lottery and the Masters cancels! Damn you COVID19! 😉
I get that ultimately things will look roughly the same in 2 weeks as they do now (minus the lunatics standing in line at Kroger), but seriously y’all, it’s a national/worldwide health crisis. Regardless of how silly it seems, we should be willing to accommodate for 2-3 weeks… it’s not that much of a sacrifice for others well-being in the long run.
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I imagine if the Masters cancels the event this year’s lottery winners will get tickets for next year.
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The Masters won’t be canceled, just delayed until about October.
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Postponed. Not cancelled.
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Please don’t ruin my outrage 😉
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I’m with you, I rent my house out. 🤦🏻♂️
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I’m willing to do whatever it takes to protect my family. I also know that going to buy 24 rolls of toilet paper or 8 gallons of hand sanitizer probably isn’t going to achieve that objective.
It’s disappointing that this thing wasn’t nipped in the bud in China. That’s probably a topic for the Playpen sometime in the aftermath.
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I have no idea other than to say (a) I’m glad i’m not at the front lines of the storm on this and pray for those who are. We all need them to come through. (b) it’s a little disturbing that with so many smart people, it has come to this. And I don’t mean that as an insult–I can’t stand the lard ass redneck who thinks all of the government are idiots and he’s smart. But it is frightening or a wake up call whatever you wanna call it. I do have faith though–and I want to have faith that we will be able to do a non-partisan political assessment of how to better prevent this from happening again.
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A good place to start would be getting our manufacturing back from China – especially pharmaceuticals. I knew we were dependent on China for our cheap gadgets but I had no idea our lifeline to fight illness was in China’s hand.
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Honestly, and it fits his platform even, but I personally would support legislation pushing medical and pharmaceutical back into the US. Its gonna raise prices though. People will be even madder at health care. But learning 97% of antibiotics (or ingredients to make them) ate China is scary. And they threatened us. We took our sterl back, we can take our medicine back.
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The problem is that when pharmaceuticals go off patent and into the generic market, the manufacturers move the production off-shore. We need the ability to produce pharmaceuticals in the US and to move it away from locations.
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We have the ability. It’s just cheaper in China.
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I understand that … the question is whether you use limited domestic production capacity on the new, patent-protected blockbuster or commoditized out of patent antibiotic. We need to build manufacturing capacity domestically. The other problem is that China is producing some of the inputs to these therapies as well.
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If you wish to change that, a good conversation with the stockholders who like the additional profit would be in order.
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It’s a national security issue. As now demonstrated.
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Yep. We need a governmental policy. Might need a statute. Possibly an FDA Reg. An Executive Order might work. But we need drug manufacturing to be done in the US not abroad and certainly our access to life saving medicine not be dependent on our biggest global enemy.
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a) I totally agree. As a nation, we should be praying for the control of the virus, for the healing of those infected, for the wisdom of the researchers who are leading the fight to stop it, and for the protection of the front-line health care workers.
b) You’re right, but the world fell victim to the weakest link in the chain. Once it was apparent the virus had gotten out of China, it was a matter of time. I hope some of the initial steps at least delayed its arrival in the US.
Regarding a non-partisan political assessment, I’m not holding my breath.
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So do I get at least one economist to explain to all the chicken little health experts that crashing the world economy(which what it appears they’re in the process of doing) will kill more people than this weak ass virus with an American mortality rate of .0000001%. (40 deaths divided by 330 million people) Also given the group the virus kills(over 80)… isn’t this a potential solution to the social security “lock box” problem? Lighten up people this is going to kill maybe a third of the number of people who will die in car wrecks this year and despite the dismissive characterizations this is a good analogy. Driving is a risky behavior we do because it is economically necessary just like going to work and enjoying my life. I personally am pissed at the politicians , bureaucrats and powers that be that think I need to be protected from myself. The NCAA b-ball tournament is probably my single favorite sporting event and some nameless, faceless and unaccountable moron has told me that I can’t be trusted to make my own decision about my own health.I’m old but healthier than most and don’t depend on the government for my healthcare so why is the decision to assume or not assume the risk of attending games not MY decision to make? The Mayor is right…..this is going to look bad in retrospect.
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I have to admit, I hadn’t thought of a virus deadly to geriatric victims as a possible solution for the looming social security shortfall. Let’s keep on keeping on and ignore it. Hell, It’ll take some strain off the medicare line item too.
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With our outstanding ability to ignore the past (SARS), I’m sure another pandemic will be along when you guys will be wishing for SS and the next generation can blow you off as not being necessary(just when your expertise is good enough to help – if they only would listen).
Btw, some of you should keep covering your eyes with your hands and continue to stick your fingers in your ears, that way you can contaminate yourselves and be removed from society before you even draw one nickel of SS. Win, win.
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Turn your sarcasm meter on, big guy.
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Glad wewoof isn’t in charge.
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It’s a notable feature of our cultural times, I guess, to dehumanize an entire segment of the population (“over 80”) because we find them inconvenient, a burden, or somehow undesirable.
Just a nameless, faceless group of people who we find useless. So it’s okay to wish them away.
Go to hell.
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The social media are filled with kids hoping: trump gets it, boomers die, wealthy die, etc. Its a horrible mindset. But I’ve seen way to many people that dont care if the elderly are killed off in mass. And also wish it on their political disagreements.
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There have also been lots of Tea Party Trumpers who’ve been willing to let those without affordable health insurance just die.
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No, what you are saying is people who dont support social medicine are willing for people to die.
That’s not the same as people screaming at the internet for boomers and the GOP to get sick and die because of hate.
One is a difference of how healthcare should be done, the other is active will for people you dont like to die.
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Wow. I cant even
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Nor I, in my 80th year on earth.
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Think this isn’t serious – think again
https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/companies/massachusetts-virus-outbreak-looks-like-italy-e2-80-99s-just-two-weeks-ago/ar-BB115mPm
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I have to share this:
My wife called her Mom yesterday evening. MIL is 70, FIL is 76. My wife very sweetly and with the best of intentions told them on speaker phone that they should stay in to avoid exposure to the virus and we wold be happy to bring them anything they needed. My Mother in law just as sweetly told my wife that they were fine and she appreciated us thinking about them, but they both felt fine and were not worried at all.
My wife suggested I call Got Sr. (71) to check on him and my Mom. It went something like this:
This is about 7:00, which would put Got Sr. about six deep.
” Hey Pop.”
” Where are you? You were supposed to come out here and plow the garden spot. And I’m tired of feeding the damn birds by myself. I don’t even like quail. This is your project”
” Yeah I know. I had to work late, this virus thing is taking up some time.”
“It’s media hype. it’s the gotdamn democrats trying to sabotage Trump.” (Got Sr. is not a fan of the democratic party)
” Maybe so, but to be on the safe side why don’t you and Mama stay around the house, I’ll be out this weekend and I can bring you anything you need..”
” #$& $0% %&^ @!&#$@&#^$. *&^%. I”LL GO AND DO AS I GOTDAMN WELL PLEASE AND THERE AINT A GOTDAMN THING YOU OR ANYBODY ELSE CAN DO TO STOP ME YOU LITTLE…” and it went down hill from there.
My wife says “You did that on purpose”.
Yeah I did. Love that guy.
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That’s my father-in-law, late 60’s / heart condition, in a nutshell. He’s convinced it’s a conspiracy to stop Donald Trump. I was a Trump voter and think he’s been treated rotten by a lot of people in the first part of his presidency, but you have to be fucking insane to think that so many smart people across the globe—who are all consulting with primary sources, i.e. physicians who spend their life studying this—are all part of some big conspiracy theory.
If you were a builder would you tell an engineer to go eff himself if he asked you to make changes to your design for safety purposes ?
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Trump has.
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BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! TDS is eating you up ain’t it, boy.
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HAhahahahahaha! Damn Cowdog. Reading that reminded me of my old man. He was one independent asshole who I have called simply to hear him go off. That almost made me miss him. Almost.
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Well told story. I can hear it. Love your pops
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I miss mine – he died early in life. Having two sons back to back to back in an unpopular war that he saw as futile was too much for his heart. He was a very decent man and instilled great values and patriotism in his two sons. We would have a better country if there were more like him.
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