Michigan Football, the 2020 Abbreviated COVID Season

[lineygoblue]

Hmmmm... interesting scenario ...

https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/university-michigan/wolverines/2020/05/18/michigan-football-season-opener-2020-pac-12-oklahoma-state/5215838002/

[Jeff Buchanan]

Crazy shit playing Okie State in Stillwater ........ cart waaaaay before the horse.

[iam416]

HARBAUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#SpeedInSpace!!!!!!!!

DONBROWN!!!!!!!!!

[lineygoblue]

Too bad we'll all have to wait until sometime in 2021 to see all that.

[Jeff Buchanan]

This could get the ball rolling. ND has announced it will re-open the campus to students in the fall. According to past statements by the NCAA, athletics will start back up consistent with a u's plans to re-open their campuses. Details are sketchy so far. Keep an eye out for them:

In announcing plans to reopen, the university did not address plans for athletics programs, including the football season, The university says it consulted with experts on its faculty, infectious disease specialists and a team from the Cleveland Clinic before deciding to reopen.

https://universitybusiness.com/heres...fall-semester/

[JRB]

To the surprise of no one, President Schlissel states for the record that there will be no football in the fall unless students are on campus.(Full article behind paywall, but the first paragraph is all you need here...).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/univers...321600?mod=mhp

[iam416]

M is really going to go that extra mile to avoid 9 in a row.

[lineygoblue]

To the surprise of no one, President Schlissel states for the record that there will be no football in the fall unless students are on campus.(Full article behind paywall, but the first paragraph is all you need here...).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/univers...321600?mod=mhp

I thought that this was the position of all the Big Ten Presidents. And I thought it was further understood that everyone (conference) plays or nobody plays.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Ho-hum ...... nothing new here.

There have been plenty of coaches and ADs being quoted by the sports press suggesting, sure, we're gonna be playing football or statements that imply there will be college sports in 2020. The NCAA said within the last month, no there won't unless "students are allowed to return to campus," and only then if state regulations don't preclude it.

I've seen plenty of innovative ways to get kids back in school. Europeans mostly coming up with them. In this country, political pressures are going to drive return to school policy on a state by state, and I expect here in FL, as the has already been demonstrated, county by county and even by municipality.

The current COVID knowledge base might allow public and private K-12 but it will be regional in application. When it comes to college campuses - social, dorm and dining hall life - no. Sports will fall in-line with that.

What Schlissel might be closing the door on is football sans fans but there was nothing that I was reading that indicated the NCAA was considering that. I have seen comments from various quarters, none remotely official, suggesting CFB could go down the road pro-sports appear to be going down.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I'm writing this in response to Liney's comment about social distancing isn't going to happen in the student section of the Big House. His post appeared after mine in the recruiting thread. The discussion about playing football during COVID belongs here....

I'm probably an outlier as far as my liberal opinions on socializing anywhere, exercising indoors and large gatherings outdoors..... with precautions taken by proprietors and patrons. But, I'm reading the medical literature, studying what's available on SARS-COV-2 and I've got a bias towards thinking the absolute risk of becoming infected without mitigation is low; with it, it's very low.

Last week, I looked at a US group that conducted a review of the literature to date. The most significant conclusion was that most of it, the stuff done early on, lacked both peer review, controls or power. The Chinese studies in particular got slammed. Certainly well intentioned so,not mocking the researchers but China is notorious for jumping in too early with research papers that on close analysis don't stand up to scrutiny when peer reviewed. They don't care about how Western medical authorities view their research; it's not smugness, its simply most of their medicine is practiced based on anecdotal evidence and they have 1000s of years of it and long memories.

So, high rates of infection from contact with surfaces, via flushing toilets full of feces, through droplet transport to surfaces via ventilation systems- all of these transmission means offered by Chinese researchers - has all petty much been shot down. There's been recent scientific research, much more rigorously done, subsequently reported in the media that downplays the risk of infection with the virus from contacting contaminated surfaces. Reasons? First, the transport of an adequate number of virions in a droplet or aerosol to precipitate an infection and subsequently COVID-19 symptoms isn't as likely as initially thought and presented in multiple Chinese research papers. Two - wash your hands, don't touch your face and an individual will break the necessary chain of events to produce an infection in its tracks regardless of the viral load on your hands/fingers from touching a contaminated surface.

The same sort of evidence is coming out in more rigorous tests that both droplet and aerosol transmission is less infectious than previously thought - same reason: the number of virions in typical droplets and aerosols is insufficient to precipitate COVID-19 symptoms. One of the confounding findings, though, is that there is no uniformity, like there is with flu or other viruses, on how the virus acts once it has made entry into the several tissues that are known to be problematic. A report coming out of Italy documents this and adds, later study of SARS-COV-2 patients is suggesting that those becoming infected in the last month, regardless of age, are less ill than those infected during the height of the Pandemic in N. Italy.

Everyone knows this but it's worth repeating in the context of my post: the older you are, the weaker your immune response, the more virulent the dose of the virus - aerosol or droplet - you get into your oropharynx and then the lungs, the more likely you are to become seriously ill. Small, aerosolized particles that are highly virulent seem to be the worst for causing serious illness in infected persons. TBC, highly virulent aerosolized particles floating around outside or inside don't seem to be all that common, they are virtually non-existent outside.

Bottom line, your risk of infection sitting in reasonably spaced seating in an open-air stadium like the Big House is less risky than it might have been thought to be even a month ago. That extends as well to the risk of students inter-mingling during typical campus activity. Just a guess but my thinking, and this isn't getting pulled out my ass, it's an informed guess, is that college campuses can probably open to accommodate some lower level of what was considered normal activity. It's going to be individualized and I'm not going to guess how M will handle it. Keep in mind that Schlissel is an immunologist - I feel pretty confident that he'll make the right call absent idiotic politics which are always a threat to otherwise informed decision making on COVID.

[Hannibal]

I fully support forfeiting all of Michigan's games this year. Losing 1-0 to OSU is by far the best outcome that we can hope for.

[lineygoblue]

I appreciate your post Jeff, but I guess my point was intended to be more comical than serious. I mean, the students are going to be next to each other, no matter what they are told.

Look, I hope this thing is licked. I hope the worst is over, and it completely disappears from the face of the earth, and never returns. I'd be very happy with that. I just don't think that the 'requirement' to 'social distance' is going to fly in the Big House, especially among the students.

[*JD*]

I appreciate your post Jeff, but I guess my point was intended to be more comical than serious. I mean, the students are going to be next to each other, no matter what they are told.

Look, I hope this thing is licked. I hope the worst is over, and it completely disappears from the face of the earth, and never returns. I'd be very happy with that. I just don't think that the 'requirement' to 'social distance' is going to fly in the Big House, especially among the students.

I've driven through the campus area 3 times in the last several days and have seen gatherings of students. No masks, no distance, and a fair amount of beer.

[lineygoblue]

Meanwhile Paul (Howard) Finebaum is trying to pick a fight with Harbaugh again, saying he "can't win" at Michigan.

Well, duhhh…

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/college/university-michigan/2020/06/08/jim-harbaugh-cant-get-done-michigan-paul-finebaum-says/5320492002/

Finebaum is the penis of the SEC.

[AlabamAlum]

Finebaum has made a career out of getting gullible people riled and roiled. Any time spent considering what he is tapping out is wasted time.