Inside NUsletter Issue 5
Big Ten dealing with autumn fallout as its attention shifts toward spring.
Good morning. We hope you’ve been able to recover after a crazy last week. Welcome to the fifth issue of the Inside NUsletter. We hope you enjoy it. If you like it, share it!
Today, we’ll once again highlight articles we published over the last week, the latest college football and basketball news, as well as some random things we found on the internet and wanted to share.
If you’ve come to expect anything from Inside NU, it’s that we don’t like to take ourselves too seriously. If it’s your first time reading, the Inside NUsletter should come off as informal but informative.
What we’ve been up to
Amid the Big Ten’s postponement of its fall football season until sometime early in 2021, co-editor-in-chief Eli Karp ended last week with another column. He analyzed and deconstructed the lack of communication and transparency in the conference’s decision-making process, as well as the potential ramifications for players and programs alike.
Co-EIC Lia Assimakopoulos then penned a personal essay sharing how Northwestern sports has shaped her experience as a student and fan, only heightening the anticipation for college athletics to return once more. Here’s a snippet:
“After Tuesday’s news of a second consecutive season without sports, I’ll have to find a new way to replace the role college football has played in my on-campus experience thus far. I know it won’t be easy, and I’ll remain optimistic for the spring, but I’m not the primary victim here. My heart goes out to all the Big Ten and Pac-12 athletes and coaches right now. If it’s hard for me and our staff at Inside NU, I can only imagine what they’re going through, and I am truly sorry. But I always believe everything happens for a reason, and their time to shine will come.”
Now that a week and a half has passed since the B1G’s decision, players, fans, administrators and coaches have turned their attention toward a potential spring season. According to University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Ronnie Green, there’s a“growing level of enthusiasm” for pulling off a winter season. Plenty of proposals and ideas have arisen to stage a shortened season that greatly reduces impact on what everyone hopes will be a normal Fall 2021.
Purdue head coach Jeff Brohm’s proposal would see an eight-game season run from the end of February to mid-April with a postseason that ends in May. Another idea, supported by Ohio State’s Ryan Day and Penn State’s James Franklin, both of whom were adamant about playing in the fall and have NFL talent to lose, would see the season kick off shortly after New Year’s. The regular season would be done by the end of February, with the postseason wrapping up in Mid-March, giving players at least six weeks before the currently scheduled NFL Draft. A plan like this one could involve the use of domes in Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Detroit, with some other cities as well. Let me tell you, folks, Pasadena is absolutely beautiful in March.
Even with a spring 2021 season, though, the ‘Cats will be without their best offensive player. Just yesterday, star left tackle and potential first-round pick Rashawn Slater announced his intention to opt out of the season, the first Northwestern player publicly to do so. He could be the highest-drafted Wildcat since Luis Castillo, who was the 28th overall selection in 2005.
“I didn’t think a winter or spring season allows for optimal recovery or training to have a great rookie year,” Slater told Yahoo Sports. “I talked about it with everyone. Everyone at Northwestern has been extremely supportive. They’ve had open and honest conversations with me. I can tell they wanted the best for me.”
NU has produced just three first-round picks in program history.
The football program was met with rare great news Monday when former Wildcat running back Jason Wright was hired to be president of the Washington Football Team. Wright is the first Black team president in NFL history and fourth former NFL player to hold that title. He’s also the youngest president in the league. Good stuff for an impressive guy.
Things that happened this week
After Justin Fields started a petition to get the Big Ten to reinstate the fall sports season, which has thus far gained over 293,000 signatures, pressure grew on the silent league to share a detailed rationale for its decision to abruptly postpone the season after releasing a new schedule just the week before. Parents
Wednesday, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren stood by the decision to postpone the football season until the spring. In an open letter addressing the backlash to his decision, Warren gave six primary reasons for the season’s postponement: the increasing transmission rate of the virus, unknown health effects of the virus, the inability to contact trace, the disruption of quarantining and contact tracing while trying to complete a season, a lack of access to testing and concerns regarding the testing supply chain.
Moreover, in an interview with The Athletic, Warren addressed the inherent issue of socially-distant football. He said medical experts had concerns about moving into contact practices, which is when the wheels began to turn on a postponement.
“But when you’re talking about contact sports, there’s only so long you can do that. We were moving into that next phase of practice where people can’t operate in that manner. When you move into full contact and full pads, things change.”
Stewart Mandel then wrote a piece addressing Warren’s reasons for postponement in opposition to the Big 12, SEC and ACC. Mandel gives the reasoning the Big Ten should’ve done from the start. It’s normal for medical experts and scientists to have different perspectives on similar or even the same data, and the risk tolerance of each conference’s leadership is evidently different.
What Mandel really gets at, though, and I’m sure many are thinking the same thing, is that somehow the Big Ten’s decision to not play football during a pandemic is getting more criticism than those who push forward, despite large outbreaks on campuses in the ACC that have forced alterations to academic plans for the semester. The Big Ten could’ve just folded disappointingly but understandingly like the Pac-12 instead of botching the messaging and staying silent.
This all comes as a group of Big Ten football parents plans to protest at conference headquarters in Rosemont, Illinois, today, despite the fact that no one will be there as the league office is primarily working remote.
After the University of North Carolina saw a cluster of coronavirus cases earlier this week week, forcing the cancellation of in-person classes, we might be seeing the reverse engineering of campus bubbles — that is, get the student body off campus so the football team can play safely. UNC’s football program vowed to march on despite the suspension of in-person instruction. Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports asserts that such a notion further diminishes the apparent amateurism of student-athletes in a piece released on Thursday.
In good news, the FDA approved a new COVID-19 diagnostic test method called SalivaDirect last weekend, which importantly runs independent of current supply chains and costs much less to run (as little as $4 per test) compared to the roughly $100 a PCR test costs. The NBA has utilized it in its bubble in Orlando, and when the approval news broke, some journalists and commenters were quick to hop on the “well maybe the Big Ten made its decision to postpone the fall season too early” wagon. But while the test could help expand testing and make it more convenient, Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News found that from a college sports point of view, it isn’t the technological breakthrough that would make things doable just yet.
Amidst all the chaos and widely publicized pictures of packed, mask-less crowds at bars at the University of Alabama, the SEC released its revamped conference-only schedule on Monday. The slate features ten games across 11 weeks beginning September 26. The SEC Championship game will be played on December 19. Interestingly, the annual Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville, dubbed the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” will still be played there despite the small possibility of an oversized cocktail party actually taking place.
On a similar note, while the SEC announced a mask requirement for fans and schools stated various plans to limit capacities to roughly 20-25 percent, Florida State (ACC) said tailgating would be permitted. The Iron Bowl will still be played on Thanksgiving Weekend, while the always highly anticipated LSU and Alabama matchup is set for November 14.
The cancellations and postponements of multiple NCAA seasons over the last couple of months have brought about questions of eligibility for student-athletes. On Wednesday, per Yahoo Sports, the NCAA Division I Council recommended an extra year of eligibility for fall sport athletes (football, men’s and women’s soccer, volleyball, field hockey and cross country) regardless of if or how much they play this season. The committee also recommended a 12-hour weekly football schedule for teams who aren’t playing in the fall. Another notable feature will see the one-time expansion of scholarship limits.
The NCAA Board of Governors could adopt these measures as soon as today, when it is next scheduled to meet, potentially clearing up many questions for players and coaches alike. If things end up like they did in the spring, though, it’ll be up to schools to decide if they want to accommodate athletes with another year of scholarship eligibility. Either way, today is important.
On the college basketball front, Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo is very bullish on the prospects of a college basketball this season this academic term, per Brendan Quinn of The Athletic and Teddy Greenstein of the Chicago Tribune. Izzo envisions “multiple bubbles” to accommodate multiple sets of programs, similar to the NBA’s and WNBA’s setups. The most amusing part of Greenstein’s interview with Izzo is the Spartan HC has talked to people at Pfizer, one of the front-runners in the coronavirus vaccine race, and says he thinks there will be a vaccine in the next few months, helping fuel his optimism about a season.
Meanwhile, NCAA Senior VP of Basketball Dan Gavitt released a statement saying plans for the men’s and women’s basketball seasons — which are current scheduled to tip off in early November — would be determined by mid-September, with contingencies in place. The NCAA simply can’t afford to not have a basketball season, which is its primary cash cow. Having no football is already bad, and having no basketball would really alter the future landscape of college sports.
Later today, watch out for speedy NU receiving target Drew Donley as he announces his commitment. The three-star Texas native has a wide variety of schools from which to choose, such as Northwestern, a few Ivies, Toledo, Hawaii, Boise State and Ole Miss. He could be the second wideout in the class of 2021. Jacob Gill, currently the lone 2021 WR, announced earlier this week he would forgo his senior season, graduate high school in December and enroll early at NU.
Good Tweets
We ended Rutger.
On the news of Jason Wright being tapped as Washington Football Team’s new president.
And of course, there are just so many Big Ten jokes flying around right now as people attempt to make sense of conference leadership and cope with a football-less fall.
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See you next week.
Written by Colin Kruse with help from Eli Karp.