CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The head football coach at perennial power Mount Union for all of six months, Geoff Dartt spent Friday on the phone, telling his new players and their families that football for the fall is off. Across Ohio and throughout fall athletic programs, other coaches were doing the same.
“It was an emotional day for our coaches and an emotional day for our athletes,” Baldwin Wallace interim athletic director John Snell, the former football coach of the Yellow Jackets for 15 years, said in a phone interview Friday. “When something hits your heart the way athletics does, and you’re not able to participate in the way you typically would, that’s tough for people to handle.”
With fewer major financial considerations to influence their choices, lower-level college athletic conferences have been making health and safety decisions that for Division I sports are complicated by the millions of dollars in football revenue at stake. While big-money college sports push back fall decisions while trying to gauge the latest coronavirus trends, Division III schools like John Carroll, Mount Union, Baldwin Wallace, Case Western and Kenyon are acting.
The Ohio Athletic Conference, which includes John Carroll, Mount Union, Baldwin Wallace and seven other schools in Ohio, on Friday announced all fall sports were postponed, and no winter sports would be played until at least Jan. 1.
The Presidents’ Athletic Conference, which includes Case Western as a football-only member, made the same decision Friday for high-contact sports like football. Low-contact sports like golf and tennis will still try to play this fall.
The North Coast Athletic Conference, which has seven of its 10 members located in Ohio, including Hiram, Wooster, Oberlin and Kenyon, announced on Wednesday it will postpone all sports until at least the end of 2020.
Of the more than 40 conferences playing Division III non-scholarship sports around the country, more than half have already put an end to college sports for the rest of this calendar year.
“It was not a decision that was taken lightly by anyone involved in it,” John Carroll athletic director Michelle Morgan said of the OAC in a phone interview Friday.
Of the more than 3,000 undergraduates at John Carroll, Morgan said nearly one-quarter play a sport. That’s an important part of the college experience, so schools may try to continue that experience. Division III schools are able to make their own decisions on how to allow athletes to potentially work out or practice this fall, while planning to try to play these fall sports in the spring of 2021.
“That’s the next step to this Tetris game,” Morgan said. “It’s basically how do we provide maximum experience that is safe, that is meaningful, knowing that we’re following the medical and health guidelines?”
Many of the universities affected by these sports decisions are still planning hybrid models of academic instruction this fall that will include some on-campus, in-person classes. So losing sports isn’t merely part of cutting back entirely on face-to-face interaction because of the coronavirus. Schools are making separate difficult choices on sports while trying to navigate the more important academic issues at hand.
“We have to look out for the best interests of our athletes, and our entire community,” Snell said. “This doesn’t just affect our athletes, it affects our entire campus.”
Decisions to postpone fall sports at the Division III level, and by Division I FCS-level football conferences like the Ivy League, the MEAC, the SWAC and the Colonial Athletic Conference, show what happens when money isn’t a major part of college sports.
“We’re not Power 5, we’re not Division I, where Ohio State and some of our peer institutions at a different NCAA level are more dependent on the revenue,” Morgan said. “That’s not a Division III model. We’re set up much differently. With that said, as a leader and as an athletic director that sits in this seat, health and safety is always my number one concern.”
Division I programs care about health and safety as well. But that concern is mixed with television contracts, supporting other sports through football revenue, the extreme interest of fans, and trying to play games involving players who are preparing for NFL careers.
The considerations for Ohio State, as well as Division I FBS programs like Kent State, Akron, Toledo and Bowling Green, are different, and the decisions are still up in the air. The NCAA on Friday pushed back any decisions on its fall sports championships for at least another few weeks. At the highest level of college sports, the concern is there but the choice is to delay final calls about fall sports for as long as possible.
(A Division III conference with the same acronym of MAC announced the cancellation of fall sports Friday, and the MAC of Kent State and Akron quickly put out a social media statement to make sure people didn’t think they had bagged football.)
Still, in their world, football at programs like John Carroll and Mount Union are incredibly serious. These are some highly successful programs that have been playing football for up to 100 years. Baldwin Wallace is where Jim Tressel played college football under his father, Lee. John Carroll produced NFL coaching legend Don Shula
Mount Union has won 13 national titles, the last in 2017. The Purple Raiders are a football powerhouse, and this fall, they won’t play football for the first time since World War II.
“This decision is very difficult, as we know how deep the desire to compete is with our student-athletes and that intercollegiate athletic events are an important part of not only life on campus but for our extended community of alumni and fans,” Mount Union president Dr. Thomas Botzman said in a statement. “However, all of us at Mount Union are confident that our coaches, faculty, and staff will work with student-athletes to build an engaging athletic experience in the fall, and into the spring semester as circumstances allow.”
Friday was tough. But the spring may bring hope. Last spring’s sports season was wiped out by the coronavirus. The spring of 2021 could see winter sports ending at the same time that both spring and fall sports are starting up.
“It’s going to be a hectic spring, but I’d rather have it be like that than not,” Snell said. “So we’ll figure things out, and the whole idea is to have an opportunity for our kids to have a season.”
At this level, they just couldn’t take that chance this fall.
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Across Ohio, college football for the fall is being canceled - cleveland.com
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