Greg Sankey has gotten plenty of pats on the back for the course he’s steered for his conference’s start to football play. He certainly deserves credit for avoiding the PR pitfalls that have plagued some of his peers, but some of the congratulations seem premature. After all, not a single SEC team has started play yet.
This dropped yesterday.
Now, Missouri wasn’t going to beat ‘Bama fully staffed, so in the short term, this means little. But what’s going to happen when a contending team takes a run of bad luck, health-wise, and loses a game or two because of a roster shortage… or, worse, two teams with major health concerns are forced to face off against each other?
If Sankey isn’t waking up every day and immediately crossing his fingers, then he’s a bigger fool than I think he is. He knows the conference still has a long way to go.
Get The Picture 
So did Orgeron, or did he not, take a herd immunity approach to the season?
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Honestly, I think it gives LSU too much credit to call what’s going on there an approach. I don’t think they know WTF they’re doing.
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Well they do say God protects fools and drunks and in Baton Rouge well….
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Gosh, every football playing university has “world class medical attention. ” All the great doctors in the world work for athletic departments.
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Does anyone know what the “cancellation policy” for a game is? Is there one? Do you have to have a certain number of players out? Can you cancel the day before? I’m expecting a shit show at some point.
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We have no answers. The one thing we know is that they’re ready to pick up the TV checks. Other than that, I’m not sure anything matters.
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Covid 19 safety is collateral damage for college football broadcast monie$…
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As the head coach at a middle school in northwest Georgia, we are about to have our third game of our six game season. We have ten teams in our conference. So far, one team has yet to play a game because of covid out breaks on their team, and then on their opponents team this week. So currently two of our ten teams have missed a 1/3 of their season due to outbreaks.
The first team we played this season could not field a JV squad due to quarantines from contact tracing and only had 21 players for their Varsity game. We have a game today and currently we are out 6 players due to quarantine and 5 out to injury, one of those injuries is due to having to play up to help fill a gap left by quarantine procedures.
The cleaning, social distancing guidelines, and water management is insane, and we have a staff of FOUR to try and get it all done. There are days that I don’t get home till 6:30 from our practices that end at 5:45. (I live less than 3 minutes from our campus) and that is just on a normal day of cleaning, disinfecting, and recording information (in the event that a player is positive on who I have to quarantine, which at this point is everyone due to the nature of the game and how many players we have to work with).
Needless to say, at the middle school level and high school level we should not be playing. It is only spreading the disease. Parents are hiding cases so their kids don’t shut down programs or cancel games. We have kids disappear for a week or more at a time, to come back and say “I had the flu, and no their is no doctor’s note.” Health surveys are taken daily with things like ” are you sore” “do you have a headache” “is your stomach upset?” Any answers of yes and the kids have to go home. Which is the safe call, but I have had less kids show up for practice this year than in all my previous years. This week alone we have had 12 different players miss a day or more because they “couldn’t pass” the survey, which is mainly 13 year olds wanting to go home and not condition and practice. But there is no accountability, because of the protocols in place. I have sat those kids for a quarter or so, (costing us a game so far) but again hard to punish them, when it is the rule we are all supposed to be playing by.
I have coached for 15 years, and this will be my last. The lack of help, listening, or understanding from our administration and school leaders have completely ruined coaching for me.
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Ugh. So sorry to read that, Austin.
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Sucks to be an educator of any sort right now AC, especially a football coach. I watched an elementary teacher spend 30 minutes walking in circles putting masks back on a couple of dozen six year old kids, getting nothing done other than that. It’s ridiculous.
Honest question: When you say the parents are hiding cases, do you think they are concealing positive results, or simply holding a symptomatic kid out and avoiding testing altogether?
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The ones I can speak for never took them or at least say they didn’t, but the schools sent them home for showing symptoms of covid 19 (which are various) but then the kid would just be out a week or more and come back saying “mom said it was flu and kept me home” or “would say I was sick, but never went to a dr”.
I mean if your kid is sick enough to be out of school 6 or more days you take them to the dr. I have three kids and if we do much as think they are sick my wife has them at the dr. Especially now.
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Wow thanks for sharing Austin. Really painful to read, but I am grateful you shared. Good to get a sense for what is going on out there.
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Don’t give up AC. Good coaches are hard to come by, and they’ll always be remembered.
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Much love friend
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Kudos to you for hanging in there this long Austin. Those kids are lucky to have someone like you.
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Cases, for the win.
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Truth. We do not know how many games will be played this season. We do not know if their will be a SEC Championship game, let alone playoffs. But at least the conference has done a nice job of positioning itself to have those things.
The Big 10 over-reacted. The Pac 12 will not opt back in. All of this is a reflection of attitudes and politics of each region.
If you opt in and end up stopping the season, it doesn’t make you wrong. It simply means you tried.
The only other move I would like to see the SEC take is to shift to the daily testing that is no longer possible, but very real. Regardless of the expense; a canary in the coalmine every day, beats 3 or 4 times a week.
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Does anyone know any numbers on COVID + players at UGA? If there was a post that I missed, I apologize. I saw where the COVID + cases at UGA dropped from about 1400 the previous week to about 400 last week. That’s good news as far as it goes.
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We’ll know in 90 days.
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I know, right. It would be easier to get the nuclear launch codes than to get information out of Kirby.
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Should have been 5vexibirion games. Trying to hold a “normal” season is a joke. Taking about playoffs on tv makes me want to pencil stab someone at espn
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