WVU athletic director Shane Lyons optimistic about football season, but it’s too early to be sure
Share this post:
If Shane Lyons’ hopes and projections are accurate, there will be college football this year in spite of covid-19. But there are no guarantees.
“Based on my conversations (with medical experts),” West Virginia’s athletic director said, “they feel that once we get to late summer, August, normal life will, hopefully, be back all across the U.S.
“I’m very optimistic that (doctors and researchers) are working around the clock to come up with something that, if you do get the virus, that it can be cured.
“I’m very optimistic we will be playing football in September. Preseason will start on time in August.”
There are others, however, who disagree, most notably, ESPN “College GameDay” analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who said he would be shocked if there is college football this year.
Lyons is counting on projections that the pandemic will spike in the next two to three weeks, leading to a possible normalization this summer.
“If you use the approach of what we learned from China, after the spike it was approximately three months that they were starting to get back to normal,” he said. “In our case, by late summer, we will be ready to play football.”
He said the best-case scenario might potentially to have some practices that were lost in the spring instead scheduled for June, without helmets.
But, he added, “If that doesn’t happen, what’s your next plan?”
The window tightens every day, and Lyons cautions there are no definite answers.
“It’s hard to say what does five months (from now) look like,” he said. “Let’s plan on eight to 10 weeks out and then making your plans.
“The next two weeks will tell us a better story. A month from now, everything becomes more crystallized.
“(Medical experts) may say, ‘You can have a team out there, but we don’t want 60,000 people showing up to football stadiums.’ That’s something we have to work through.”
If games are played in empty stadiums, as was initially suggested for postseason basketball tournaments before they were canceled, the loss of ticket sales would create another problem. Lyons said the loss of Big 12 and NCAA basketball tournaments already is costing WVU about $2 million.
“It’s still early on right now to project what that’s going to look like,” he said. “Obviously, there are a lot of people out of jobs, which is very, very unfortunate. We’ll continue to evaluate that and try to make decisions as we move forward.
“We are going to have to be very flexible in our approach.”