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BIG TEN
Commissioner Kevin Warren responded after a week of silence following what appears to be his decision to shut down the athletics in a college athletic conference.
First, there was a letter to the Big Ten “family” released on social media that appeared with his signature. Although some say it provides new “details”, it actually was the original press release warmed over.
You can read it here.
He also did a brief interview with Nicole Auerbach of The Athletic:
The key points covered in both:
1 – There was an “overwhelming” vote, but the Big Ten is a secretive organization of public schools (all but one) and we will not provide a detail of who voted and how they vote.
He added that the Big Ten has never previously discussed its voting process — nor has the league listed which schools voted for or against various decisions — and that “it’s important just to recognize that a vote from our chancellors and presidents was in support of postponing the fall season. We don’t want to get in a position where it’s, “Who voted for what?’ ”
2 – There are six reasons cited for the decision, with the shroud of “uncertainty” from his experts clouding the whole process. Uncertain transmission, uncertain effects of the illness, uncertain testing process.
3 – All of this is predicated on the questionable assumption that “transmission rates continue to rise at an alarming rate” with no mention that Covid-19 is of little actual danger to any of the student-athletes involved.
3 – Warren is not interested in lessening the uncertainty that clouds his experts’ minds by talking to other experts. The status assessment of “uncertainty” on August 11 by his experts is the only assessment worth listening to. The decision WILL NOT BE REVISITED.
4 – He modestly asserts that he knows he did not due a very good job of communicating his decision that was so devastating to so many – but resists any thought that he should not be entrusted with making and communicating future devastating decisions.
“So there is no confusion,” Warren said, “we need to focus on what we can do to move forward as a conference. This last week has been emotional for all parties involved. We need to move forward. We really do. There are things that we can do better. There are things that I can do better. And that I will do better.
“But we need to get back to being the strong Big Ten conference.”
Warren’s comments and the open letter come three days after a petition to reinstate the football season started by Ohio State star quarterback Justin Fields that amassed more than 280,000 signatures amid calls to reverse the decision from a number of player parent groups. While he did not commit to setting up a meeting with parents, Warren did say that he is going to get feedback from athletes and their families to answer the question: What can the Big Ten improve?
“Some of our student-athletes felt very strongly about playing, and some didn’t want to play or had concerns,” Warren said. “There’s a lot of honest emotion, worthwhile emotion, involved. I understand that. What we have to do is make sure we do better as we go forward and communicate better. …
“2020 has been a year that has been complicated and complex, but there are certain things that that we can do a better job of in the Big Ten and I can do a better job of personally is from a communication standpoint. This was a difficult process. These were difficult decisions being made. They impacted everyone.”
Warren is under attack from Big Ten parents for arbitrarily (in conjunction with anonymous unnamed “experts”) denying their kids the chance to play even as his own son is playing for Mississippi State. Warren implies that Powers Warren has gone rogue.
“As a family, we’ve had many difficult discussions regarding this issue,” Warren said. “But the decisions we make in the Big Ten conference we have to look at from a macro level. We need to focus on what’s right for our nearly 10,000 student-athletes at 14 institutions.”
Pat Forde of SI.com who wrote a column demanding more answers, seems somewhat happy with the response, and finds a part of it indicating that the Big Ten will actually play its season before “spring”.
“Now I’m doing everything I can to focus on the future, so our student-athletes can have a rewarding Big Ten experience in the winter and spring.”
The wording there is significant. Multiple league sources told SI Wednesday that consensus is building toward a winter football season, starting in early January and ending in late February, utilizing indoor stadiums around the Big Ten footprint. SI’s Albert Breer had the first information on that plan last week.
Here is what Breer had:
Imagine this—the Big Ten launches a season Jan. 1, playing on Thursday and Friday nights during the first two rounds of the NFL playoffs, and on Saturdays otherwise. And they do it in some combination of the five indoor football stadiums (Syracuse, Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis) within shouting distance of the league’s footprint. Meanwhile, on the more temperate West Coast, the Pac-12 launches with a similar plan.
In this scenario, an eight-game season, with a bye, could be wrapped up by the end of February, with some semblance of a postseason completed by mid-March.
Maybe the ACC, SEC and Big 12 join in, maybe they don’t. Either way, this shakes up the ’21 calendar for the NFL significantly. And if you want to know how the NFL would react to this, I’ve got news for you—these sorts of concepts aren’t just landing on their radar now.
I’m told these are ideas that have been discussed by college coaches already and, notably, NFL teams would be willing to help. The Lions, for one, were approached by a Big Ten school all the way back in the spring about using Ford Field in this way. NFL teams also have discussed what it would take to move the combine and the draft back a month (potentially having the combine in early April and draft in late May) to accommodate the college game.
Are there a lot of moving parts here? Sure. But there’s also reason for people involved to be motivated to get it done. For the Big Ten and Pac-12, this would be a shot—by playing a winter season rather than a spring season—to give their players the chance to play without totally firebombing their 2021 season, and maybe even create an option for other conferences to delay their seasons. For the NFL, it would mitigate what will certainly be a messy, messy situation for its ’21 draft class, in getting most top prospects on the field.
So if the Pac-12 goes along, we could have a virtual Rose Bowl with virtual flowers and virtual floats! An on-line float designing contest!
Why did the other conferences reach a different decision than Warren of the Big Ten and his experts? They listened, on the subject of heart complications, to a Mayo Clinic expert based in Big Ten country. John Talty of AL.com:
Michael Ackerman isn’t a college football fan.
The Mayo Clinic genetic cardiologist has been to two college football games in his life.
But if we have college football this fall, Dr. Ackerman will be one of the reasons why. His perspective on myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, helped the Big 12 hold off on canceling its season, which would have set off a string of dominos that could have doomed college football last week. Without the Big 12, the ACC would have likely dropped out, and it would have been increasingly difficult for the SEC to move forward alone. The fate of the 2020 season hinged on the biggest wild card of the Power 5 conferences.
The Big 12 brought in Ackerman for its Tuesday call last week amid a Sports Illustrated report the conference was split on what to do. The Big Ten and Pac-12 had already announced their plans to cancel the fall football season, citing myocarditis as a primary factor in those decisions. Before the Tuesday call, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told the Dallas Morning News, “You’d be less than forthright if you didn’t acknowledge between the myocarditis and some of the other things that are new, it hasn’t raised the concern level.”
In two weeks, it went from a secondary issue to the topic that created considerable concern among Big 12 university leaders after multiple recent national stories detailed the risks involved. With the season hanging in the balance, myocarditis was poised to be the issue that pushed the Big 12 into the same fate as the Big Ten and Pac-12.
Enter Ackerman.
The Minnesota-based cardiologist leads the Windland Smith Rice Sudden Death Genomics Lab which studies, among other things, sudden death in young athletes. He explained to the Big 12′s leaders that a new myocarditis study in the Journal of American Medical Association that sparked panic across college sports didn’t have the “bandwidth” to be transferable in a useful way. The study, conducted in Germany and composed of middle-aged adults, found that 78 percent of the 100 participants had some cardiac abnormality. Ackerman said it’d be a “scientific foul” to infer that those findings are relevant for 18 to 24-year old athletes.
“You cannot make that leap,” Ackerman exclaimed.
He said they shouldn’t use myocarditis as the reason to cancel college football now.
“There’s just too many unknowns to say we have new damaging, alarming evidence that COVID-19 myocarditis is the big, bad spooky thing in town now, and we need to do something about it,” Ackerman said. “Not new news at all; we’ve known that this virus can affect the heart muscle for five months now. It’s not new, it just got put forward in a new way, and it’s taken on a new life.”
Ackerman’s expertise proved very influential within the Big 12 ranks. Here was a qualified expert with no stakes in whether college football would be played this fall, giving the green light to not throw in the towel yet. Baylor AD Mack Rhoades told ESPN Ackerman, “provided us with a comfort level” that a player who tests positive for the coronavirus could safely return to competition after going through a cardiac screening. Big 12 leaders were intently listening with “their ears wide open” when Ackerman talked, according to a Big 12 administrator.
Not long after Ackerman briefed the group Tuesday night, the Big 12′s leaders decided to move forward with fall football plans. Bowlsby said Ackerman provided “very helpful information.”
“We are going to take the advice of our medical advisors and medical experts in this area, and certainly Dr. Ackerman has a strong knowledge base when it comes to the areas of myocarditis and cardio issues,” said Ed Stewart, the Big 12’s executive associate commissioner who oversees football and serves as liaison to its medical advisors.
The Mayo Clinic cardiologist didn’t sugarcoat that myocarditis can be a serious issue. The inflammation of the heart, caused by viral infections, can ultimately be deadly in rare cases. Former Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis, who collapsed during basketball practice, died at the age of 27 from myocarditis. Brian Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer, said last week he was aware of 12 athletes suffering from myocarditis after COVID-19. It remains an issue that bears close watching within college athletics going forward.
Ackerman pushed for the Big 12 to consider additional heart-related protocols to mitigate any possible risks, with the conference adopting plans to test athletes who had the coronavirus with an EKG, cardiac MRI, echocardiogram and troponin blood test. He stressed that any player who contracts COVID-19 needs to have a “squeaky clean cardiac evaluation” before getting the go-ahead to return to play. He cautioned them to consider possible mental health ramifications of canceling a season, referencing past experiences with athletes who suffered after being medically disqualified for heart issues.
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There will be more hurdles for conferences like the Big 12 and CUSA to overcome in the coming weeks. Fears of what will happen when non-athlete college students return to campus have already been crystallized at the University of North Carolina which moved to online-only learning after only a week. COVID-19 testing concerns and the challenges around quarantine restrictions for athletes aren’t going away. A decision to move forward one week in August doesn’t guarantee that every college football game will be played this fall.
Still, no issue frightened college leaders quite like myocarditis over the last two weeks. Pac-12 ADs and coaches were in favor of playing a fall season until a call with the conference’s medical advisors discussing the coronavirus-related heart issues made it a “no-brainer,” to cancel the fall season, a Pac-12 coach told The Athletic. The Big 12′s call could have headed a similar direction without Ackerman’s perspective. If it had, any semblance of a 2020 fall season would have been dead.
Ackerman won’t be attending games in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium or Bryant-Denny Stadium anytime soon.
But if there are any games played inside those stadiums this fall, he’ll be one of the reasons why.
There will be lawyers, as parents groups (perhaps backed by coaches) try to pierce Warren’s web of secrecy on the process. This on a longshot Mars rescue mission from Trevor Woods of Maizenbrew.com:
Michigan fans know his name well, Tom Mars. The attorney who helped quarterback Shea Patterson gain eligibility for the 2018 season after transferring from Ole Miss.
Mars is making headlines again, due to how the NCAA and Big Ten are handling certain issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With Big Ten parents from Michigan, Ohio State, Iowa, Nebraska, Penn State, and other programs writing letters to commissioner Kevin Warren, it’s clear the majority of parents want answers from the conference as to why they postponed the fall 2020 sports season.
Since the Big Ten announced the postponement of the season on August 11, parents feel they haven’t received enough information from Warren to accept his rationale. Enter Tom Mars.
“I’m not sure the Big Ten knows this but, one way or the other, the players and the parents are going to get their hands on at least most of the information that was available to the Big Ten when they voted on this decision. If they did vote. Maybe they didn’t,” Mars said on Sirius XM. “And people may wonder ‘How are they going to do that?’ It’s not only simple, it’s the next step in the process. And I’m actually on the verge of coordinating a massive request for emails, text messages, presentations and financial analysis from all member institutions of the B1G, and they’ll be required to produce those under the Freedom of Information statutes.”
While it’s anyone’s guess whether there will actually be a fall football season, Mars crafted a document entitled “Action Plan to Mitigate Concerns and Legal Risks of Playing Fall 2020 Football”, which in part calls for the NCAA lifting their early August ban of liability waivers. The plan calls for a school to still be potentially liable if there’s negligence and they fail to provide reasonable care, which is a definite safe-guard for players. Further, his plan would preserve the rights of student-athletes who choose not to execute a waiver.
“The issue here is all about freedom of choice,” Mars told Sportico. “If a student-athlete can enlist in the military without getting approval from the NCAA, with the risk of death or serious injury being so obvious, why shouldn’t a student-athlete be free to sign a liability waiver and accept the risks of virus-related health problems?”
Freedom of choice aside, virus-related health problems are increasing on college campuses. In the first week since classes began, the University of North Carolina had 130 positive cases and will no longer hold in-person classes on campus. The University of Notre Dame, a relatively small campus, went from 58 positive cases on Monday to 147 on Tuesday. And at the time of publishing, Michigan State announced they’ll be going online only this fall. In short, it’s likely we’ll continue to see covid cases rise across the country on college campuses, and in turn these institutions will opt for virtual learning. It’s fair to wonder whether the average college student is safer from coronavirus, or student-athletes who have access to adequate testing and medical professionals are safer.
“Who is safer on campus right now—student-athletes in a relatively controlled environment or the students in frats and sororities in these photos we’ve all seen, who think it’s not cool to wear a mask and social distance?,” Mars asked. He acknowledges that it won’t matter what any commissioner decided to do about college football if campuses shut down due to widespread outbreaks, but he’s still trying to craft a path forward for a fall season because it’s what the majority of players and parents want.
As we sit here on August 18, Mars is just getting started with his goal of getting the Big Ten and Kevin Warren to release pertinent information that will bring an end any speculation players and parents have about why the season was postponed. The longer this process drags on, though, Mars feels wouldn’t be in the best interest of Warren or the conference. “Why wouldn’t the commissioner proactively release that information and explain it and put it in context,” Mars said. “In my view, the longer Kevin Warren resists calls for transparency the more likely it is that he’s gonna have a very short tenure as commissioner.”
And finally some comments that the Big Ten Conference thoughtfully allowed to Warren’s letter on its twitter account.
@mattpoulsen
Made it so much worse with this. He basically said nothing other than “we made the right choice.” Can’t back up the decision with an objective data. Can’t expand on the vote. And on top of it does so in a cowardly letter. This guy can’t possibly keep his job.
@prepseer
The letter does not address the failure of the Committee to include players and family members, and even coaches and ADs in their deliberations. There was also no mention of potential Covid related lawsuits, which may have been the primary reason for canceling.
@jfsemmer
As soon as I read “transmission rates continue to rise at an alarming rate” I knew this was propoganda. Other than (maybe) Illinois (which is far from alarming), there isn’t a single state in the BIG that has an increase in cases per day.
@CbusTodd
Proud of the B1G for this decision. If you truly think the other conferences are going to end up playing, you are deluded. Are the ACC going to play now that both Notre Dame & NC have transitioned to distance learning? Football is not as important as human lives.
@Econn25
He needs to backtrack at this point and let the schools that want to play go ahead and play. Nobody would think any less of his leadership capabilities because nobody can think any less of his leadership capabilities.
@JonHarshbarger
Right decision! People commenting here just don’t understand the risks. It’s one thing for local students to play, it’s another for teams to travel, exposing them to greater risk.
@Unclerico9806
Even if they are online and at school that isn’t any better. But frankly there is no place better for them to be than on the field. Because I can tell you if they stayed home they aren’t going to be couped up at home all day. This whole ordeal is pure BS.
@LJMoss62
You left out the part about political pressures from the cancel culture.
@jrbigredfan
There will be Public Relations seminars devoted solely to this debacle. Every organization and business will be trained to avoid doing everything @bigten has done the past two weeks. No credibility results in no trust
@HuskerDave77
@KevinFWarren is taking all of the heat, but IF the presidents did ACTUALLY vote. Why haven’t they taken any heat or answered any questions on what was discussed in the meeting? Are they using Kevin as a scapegoat? I know what side @RonnieDGreen was on, but what about the others?
What does Paul Finebaum say?
On Thursday morning’s edition of ESPN’s Get Up, Paul Finebaum had a few things to say about the conference’s commissioner, who spoke publicly yesterday for the first time last Tuesday’s postponement.
“It’s too late,” Finebaum said about the conference possibly reversing course. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. While I respect Kevin Warren and know him moderately well, he’s proving to be a rookie in the biggest moment of his career. It’s the biggest moment in college football’s existence and he continues to fail. I wish I could do it over again? That’s like running a stop sign during your driver’s test. Come on. He flat out blew it. Now I’m not saying he blew the decision. We don’t know yet whether that’s the right decision or not. But he has stumbled around. He still can’t get it right. He issued a statement. Now he’s not sure whether he can meet with parents, how tone deaf can you be?”
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