Coronavirus cases at some schools show the return of college football contains potential roadblocks - The Dallas Morning News

Not along ago, Texas football coach Tom Herman saw new offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich scribbling away on a white board.

“What’s all this,” Herman said, drawing a perplexed look from Yurcich. Herman elaborated: “All these squiggly lines, and circles and squares and X’s, what is this?”

Responded Yurcich: “Coach, it’s football.”

While Herman certainly knew what it was, the point was made. After dealing with countless Zoom calls and sessions on COVID-19 and with the protests going on throughout the country, football itself had become a back burner issue for the past few months.

That changes for Herman and his fellow Big 12 coaches on Monday, when schools can begin voluntary football conditioning and workouts. Other fall sport athletes in the Big 12 can return July 1 with men’s and women’s basketball players beginning workouts July 6.

Coaches and athletic administrators are hoping that after considerable planning, things go smoothly.

Maybe or maybe not.

Texas A&M and the rest of the SEC began June 8 with few problems. The Aggies reported “less than five” tests for COVID-19 out of more than 500 tests, athletic director Ross Bjork said.

Elsewhere, there were cautionary examples. Houston suspended all voluntary workouts Friday when six symptomatic athletes tested positive for COVID-19. That was accompanied by an increase in positive tests throughout the Houston metropolitan area.

Even before voluntary workouts began, Iowa State announced 10 athletes, including two football players, had tested positive – a high number in contrast to most schools.

The announcements underscored that the return of football contains potential roadblocks, including what happens if positive COVID-19 tests occur during a game week.

Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades, in an interview this past week with SicEm365 Radio, likened the return of athletes to a race.

“I think it’s the first step,” Rhoades said. “It’s the start of the race in terms of bringing student-athletes to campus and the whole preparation for the start of a fall season.”

While other Big 12 schools have already begun testing, Baylor will begin this week after a pilot program with 20 football players last week, Rhoades told SicEM365.

“We’ll begin the four-day process of on-boarding football, take a breath and see how that goes and what we learned from that,” Rhoades said.

Rhoades said he has a “very robust” plan that includes a medical response team in case of positive tests.

“We certainly talked about it as a department,” Rhoades said. “It’s not if we have any positives, it’s when and making sure than when we do we handle it the right way.”

Watching closely will be Oklahoma, which decided to wait to have any athletes return until July 1 – even before the Big 12 set its return date.

“We assessed the risks and reward quotient of it all, and we determined coming back early in June created a higher rate of risk that far outweighed any of the gains that we could get coming back at that time,” athletic director Joe Castiglione said on a Zoom teleconference this past week.

“We looked at what would be a fair amount of time to come back, so we identified July 1 because it's still nine weeks before the date of the first game, assuming it happens as it's scheduled.”

Herman said he expects the situation to continue to evolve once workouts begins – and adjust accordingly.

“It has been and continues to be just planning and planning and planning and planning and planning,” Herman said. “Then all of the sudden the NCAA or the Big 12 will throw us a curve ball or the CDC or the state government will throw us a curve ball and we’ve got to adjust.

“Then you throw all those plans in the trash and start over again. We feel it’s certainly better than the alternative.”

Find more Texas stories from The Dallas Morning News here.

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