Post by The Admin on Mar 27, 2020 9:01:09 GMT -6
Berry Tramel: Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby says conference must play the waiting game
oklahoman.com/article/5658729/berry-tramel-big-12-commissioner-bob-bowlsby-says-conference-must-play-the-waiting-game
oklahoman.com/article/5658729/berry-tramel-big-12-commissioner-bob-bowlsby-says-conference-must-play-the-waiting-game
Bob Bowlsby could have made us all feel a lot better with certain answers to two specific questions.
Are you confident that Big 12 football will be ready to go by September? If you are not confident in starting football on time, do you have contingency plans for a delayed start?
If the Big 12 commissioner had answered yes (confident) and yes (plan in place), we might all feel a little better. Instead, on a teleconference Thursday, Bowlsby told us not what we wanted to hear, but the truth. He has no idea if Big 12 football will be ready to launch in September, and no, it’s far too early for a Plan B as the coronavirus has put the kibosh on American sports.
“The uncertainty of all this is unnerving,” Bowlsby said.
“We haven’t done a lot of modeling and we haven’t done a lot of planning, because I just think it’s far too early to do that. We certainly are looking at the next 60-90 days. Depending on how that goes, we’ll begin modeling what the fall looks like. You could spend a whole lot of time with it and find out two weeks later the circumstances have changed and your computations are no longer viable.”
Bowlsby is a smart guy. It’s been an under-reported story, starting with me, how great Bowlsby has been for the Big 12. The league has regained stability and found financial affluence under Bowlsby’s watch. A conference once on the eve of destruction now clearly is the No. 3 conference in college athletics, behind only the SEC and Big Ten behemoths.
So when Bowlsby talks, I listen. We all should.
“I think it’s going to continue to evolve,” Bowlsby said. “I don’t think for a minute we have access to all the information we need that to say we’re going to be back playing on May 15 or we’re going to be back playing on June 15.
“I remember well the time period after 9/11. That one was awfully difficult on our nation, and yet you little by little saw returns to normalcy, after three or four days, then after 10 days, then after a month. This just has a much longer tale, it has a great deal more uncertainty. It’s an invisible enemy that we don’t fully know how to fight.”
Bowlsby said the Big 12 and its peer conferences in college football are talking to the same authorities and experts everyone is talking to. He’s heard six to eight weeks before normalcy returns, he’s heard 10-12 weeks, he’s even heard that the virus could fall off, then return with a rally next autumn and make us go through this all over again.
That means we must practice patience, which is not exactly a human strength.
“I just don’t think there’s a lot of credibility in putting together anything other than very rudimentary plans,” Bowlsby said. “Right now, our plan is to play the football season as it’s scheduled. If we find out that we have to depart from that, we will do so. We will do it with plenty of time to let people know what it is we’re thinking and to challenge what we’re thinking.”
Bowlsby said the Big 12 would work in collaboration with the other Power 5 conferences. No one wants a six-game Pac-12 schedule and a nine-game SEC schedule. No one wants packed stadiums at Clemson and an empty stadium at Ohio State.
Bowlsby even broached the subject not just of whether fans would be allowed into stadiums, but would they want to return.
“It’s hard to imagine looking up into a grandstand and seeing people sit six feet apart,” Bowlsby said. “Beyond that, there probably will be lots of people that give consideration to what kind of public assembly they want to do. I do think it will cause people to take pause, wonder what kind of things they’re sharing other than enthusiasm for a game or enthusiasm for a school or a team, when they got into a stadium.”
It seems like forever ago, but it was only two weeks ago that Bowlsby and the rest of the Big 12 woke up in Kansas City with plans to tip off the Big 12 Tournament quarterfinals with only 250 ticketed fans allowed to watch from the Sprint Center seats. By 10:30 a.m., of course, the tournament was canceled.
“I suppose it’s possible we could end up returning to some form of competition before we got to the point where we were comfortable with public assembly, and we could end up with what we thought we might end up with it in basketball, which is playing before no crowd,” Bowlsby said. “On one hand, that allows you to watch it on television. But the environment would certainly be far poorer as a result of not having an enthusiastic crowd in the stands.”
OK, so Bowlsby didn’t make you feel any better. But let me leave you with a thought that could cheer you up.
The Big 12 is in good hands.
- Berry Tramel
Are you confident that Big 12 football will be ready to go by September? If you are not confident in starting football on time, do you have contingency plans for a delayed start?
If the Big 12 commissioner had answered yes (confident) and yes (plan in place), we might all feel a little better. Instead, on a teleconference Thursday, Bowlsby told us not what we wanted to hear, but the truth. He has no idea if Big 12 football will be ready to launch in September, and no, it’s far too early for a Plan B as the coronavirus has put the kibosh on American sports.
“The uncertainty of all this is unnerving,” Bowlsby said.
“We haven’t done a lot of modeling and we haven’t done a lot of planning, because I just think it’s far too early to do that. We certainly are looking at the next 60-90 days. Depending on how that goes, we’ll begin modeling what the fall looks like. You could spend a whole lot of time with it and find out two weeks later the circumstances have changed and your computations are no longer viable.”
Bowlsby is a smart guy. It’s been an under-reported story, starting with me, how great Bowlsby has been for the Big 12. The league has regained stability and found financial affluence under Bowlsby’s watch. A conference once on the eve of destruction now clearly is the No. 3 conference in college athletics, behind only the SEC and Big Ten behemoths.
So when Bowlsby talks, I listen. We all should.
“I think it’s going to continue to evolve,” Bowlsby said. “I don’t think for a minute we have access to all the information we need that to say we’re going to be back playing on May 15 or we’re going to be back playing on June 15.
“I remember well the time period after 9/11. That one was awfully difficult on our nation, and yet you little by little saw returns to normalcy, after three or four days, then after 10 days, then after a month. This just has a much longer tale, it has a great deal more uncertainty. It’s an invisible enemy that we don’t fully know how to fight.”
Bowlsby said the Big 12 and its peer conferences in college football are talking to the same authorities and experts everyone is talking to. He’s heard six to eight weeks before normalcy returns, he’s heard 10-12 weeks, he’s even heard that the virus could fall off, then return with a rally next autumn and make us go through this all over again.
That means we must practice patience, which is not exactly a human strength.
“I just don’t think there’s a lot of credibility in putting together anything other than very rudimentary plans,” Bowlsby said. “Right now, our plan is to play the football season as it’s scheduled. If we find out that we have to depart from that, we will do so. We will do it with plenty of time to let people know what it is we’re thinking and to challenge what we’re thinking.”
Bowlsby said the Big 12 would work in collaboration with the other Power 5 conferences. No one wants a six-game Pac-12 schedule and a nine-game SEC schedule. No one wants packed stadiums at Clemson and an empty stadium at Ohio State.
Bowlsby even broached the subject not just of whether fans would be allowed into stadiums, but would they want to return.
“It’s hard to imagine looking up into a grandstand and seeing people sit six feet apart,” Bowlsby said. “Beyond that, there probably will be lots of people that give consideration to what kind of public assembly they want to do. I do think it will cause people to take pause, wonder what kind of things they’re sharing other than enthusiasm for a game or enthusiasm for a school or a team, when they got into a stadium.”
It seems like forever ago, but it was only two weeks ago that Bowlsby and the rest of the Big 12 woke up in Kansas City with plans to tip off the Big 12 Tournament quarterfinals with only 250 ticketed fans allowed to watch from the Sprint Center seats. By 10:30 a.m., of course, the tournament was canceled.
“I suppose it’s possible we could end up returning to some form of competition before we got to the point where we were comfortable with public assembly, and we could end up with what we thought we might end up with it in basketball, which is playing before no crowd,” Bowlsby said. “On one hand, that allows you to watch it on television. But the environment would certainly be far poorer as a result of not having an enthusiastic crowd in the stands.”
OK, so Bowlsby didn’t make you feel any better. But let me leave you with a thought that could cheer you up.
The Big 12 is in good hands.
- Berry Tramel