I’m totally onboard with this decision. Financially it certainly will hurt. But the likelihood is there will be a vaccine and hopefully the spread of this darn thing will settle down by spring. Why roll the dice with peoples lives? Save one fan or player and missing a season is not important.

I think it would have financially hurt us more to play. Losing the SJSU and Nevada game cost us $775,000. Would have been extremely difficult to lose that and have no ticket revenue. With a spring season there is *hopefully* fans in the stands buying tickets.

I think rolling over a year of eligibility for everyone would have really effected programs for the next several years. People tend to focus on the seniors getting another year, but it’s everyone. How can you recruit next season’s freshman class, when you have a full freshman class in house? There are only so many slots available.

Unfortunate, but understandable.

I wonder what ‘spring’ means? Seems like they would need to play March-April to give players time to recover for a ‘normal’ camp in August. Fun times practicing in Cheney or Missoula in February!

I think rolling over a year of eligibility for everyone would have really effected programs for the next several years. People tend to focus on the seniors getting another year, but it’s everyone. How can you recruit next season’s freshman class, when you have a full freshman class in house? There are only so many slots available.

Exactly right. Are you implying that decision has been made, i.e., not to grant another year of eligibility or are you assuming a spring season avoids the issue?

Maybe start camp a few weeks late & / or a shortened season?

Or the Spring season could be flag football.

(I believe we'll look back on the attack on the HCQ cocktail - cheap, safe, proven - as unprecedented.)

I know people hate it when you say ‘it is what it is,’ but that’s
the case,” said Aggie head football coach Dan Hawkins.

“I’m disappointed for the kids, but we’ll adjust and we’ll roll.
Our guys are great. They get it and they want to be safe.”

Hawkins said football staff and school officials have been “very honest and transparent” with the players and have presented them with “all sorts of scenarios. So it was disappointing, but absolutely not a surprise. Medically, it’s the right decision.

“Kevin (Blue) and Gary (May) were great through this whole
process. They were very supportive of everyone and we all
knew what was going on.

Now, the shape of winter/spring football for the Aggies rests with the Big Sky Council of Presidents and the member schools’ athletic directors. Decisions to be made include starting dates, whether the current schedule will simply translate to its new “spring” home, will fans be allowed and whether the conference’s decision will spur a decision about a Football Championship Subdivision playoff, albeit truncated.

“We’re going to work with the NCAA to see if there’s any possibility of an FCS championship playoff in the spring,” May reported. “Short of that, we may be able to have a Big Sky championship game if we split into divisions. That’s all up in the air at this point. I can’t imagine the FCS will go ahead with a fall playoff.”

Read more here: https://www.davisenterprise.com/sports/reports-say-big-sky-to-move-remaining-games-to-spring/

I’m implying that spring would count as a year of play. Otherwise I think they’d have to grant another year like they did with spring sports. Spring sports are mostly partial scholarships so they have a little more wiggle room. Football, especially at FBS, would be a nightmare

Meanwhile Governor Cuomo of New York, the epicenter for Covid19, says New York schools will be open.

FWIW, a friend on campus says there is now some activity, and it looks like some older structures - Young, Chemistry, etc - are having some work done.

Re: work on campus: A neighbor of mine is a contractor and doing work at Sac State this summer. Easier with the campus nearly vacant. Powers that be told friend to get the job done while the money is still approved. Also know someone who, thanks to seniority rules, is on the margin at Davis. His return will depend upon how many students come back and live in the dorms. Hopeful. Now we need the students and others to respect the guidelines. Dorms and college with masks and social distance are not fun, but have to be more fun than another year with mom & dad.

if teams don’t play in the spring, the same nightmare applies. I expect many teams won’t play in the spring either for health or other reasons including ticket revenue. So we’ll have some conferences who burn player elegibility and others who don’t, except perhaps the five years to play four may still apply.

last spring they waived 5 to play 4 when they didn’t count the truncated seasons as a year of play. For spring sport seniors it can be tricky. You have to be making academic progress for eligibility, but you add three quarters that you didn’t plan for. So you’ll see some double majors or kids trying to get into a grad program. Football in spring wouldn’t face that. But, you’re right - if some play, and some don’t it will be a mess. And if the P5 play fall, that will really disrupt things. You might see more FCS to FBS transfers like Sac’s Thomson coming.

PAC 12 AND BIG 10 TO ANNOUNCE DECISION TO CANCEL 2020 FALL FOOTBALL ON TUESDAY

That is according to Dan Patrick on his show this morning. Big 10 vote was 12-2 with only Iowa and Nebraska voting to play. do not know the PAC 12 vote. My guess is that it was unanimous.

From the Davis Enterprise: QB Brock Johnson has decided not to play football.

Notes: Aggie QB Brock Johnson did not “opt out” of playing football because of the pandemic (as reported last week by The Enterprise). Hawkins said the Mission Viejo native is a senior who wants to take advantage of employment opportunities. “It had nothing to do with the virus,” clarified Hawkins. Every year programs lose a player or three for one reason or another — but this year if anyone leaves a team, fans and media often assume it’s virus related. …

https://www.davisenterprise.com/sports/hawkins-we-have-to-use-the-time-to-re-invent-ourselves/

he’s a pretty bright kid when it comes to social media and developing related online courses. Seems like the transfer here worked out well for his future.

https://magazine.ucdavis.edu/setting-the-rhythm/

Got a call today from the department. 3 choices for season ticket holders. Get a refund, use for credit for next fall, or donate funds to the department. No mention of spring ball.

When I talked to them , they just said ‘credit’ but no specifics about spring or next fall. I chose credit. Hope to use it sooner (basketball?) rather than later.

BTW, I think he said season tickets were at about 50% of previous year, not surprising since the big push normally comes in February and March.

The online FAQ says if football is played in the spring, season ticket holders choosing the credit option will have first right of refusal to apply their credit to their seats. If you made a Team Aggie donation to secure a certain ticket category, that portion is not refundable and you may either roll it to next season or designate it as a special gift for use now.

My team Aggie donation wasn't discussed, but we had a lousy cell connection. I’m hoping to kick in a bit more. The loss of departmental revenue from sjsu and Reno was brought up. Glad I’m not the person trying to balance the budget.

Excellent in depth article in the washington post today regarding the potential legal liability of college and universities that go forward with football this fall. Explains the legal theories of liability against various defendants including: the football coaches, the medical staff, the university, the conference and even the NCAA. Describes the potential defenses available to the defendants including “assumption of the risk” by the players (weak) and other defenses/issues like “lack of proof of causation” (Strong), i.e very hard to prove that the player got the virus from another team mate and not at a bar? Says the NCAA has outlawed the use of signed waivers for players which I did not know. Bottom line: there will be many lawsuits if football is played this fall and players get sick. If someone could cut and paste this article it would be great.

Here you go:

If college football players have complications from coronavirus, expect lawsuits to follow
By Emily Giambalvo
August 17, 2020 at 6:52 a.m. PDT
The last week of decision-making revealed college football’s fractured landscape. No single authority governs all and conferences make choices — even ones as critical as whether to play during a pandemic — on their own. The Big Ten and Pac-12 decided the novel coronavirus presented too many health risks, so they punted on the fall season and hope to play in the spring. The SEC, ACC and Big 12 continue moving toward the season that begins next month.
Even as the nation navigates the same pandemic and analyzes similar sets of data, these conferences, each with its own medical advisory board, have come to disparate conclusions. All leagues say they are prioritizing athlete health and safety, but their risk tolerances clearly differ. By playing a football season, these schools have accepted the chance that an athlete who contracts the virus could suffer from severe complications. In doing so, they’re taking a legal risk, because if an outbreak on a team leads to an adverse outcome, schools will inevitably find themselves faced with lawsuits.
“When one takes gambles with human life, and it doesn't work out okay, there's an excellent probability that somebody is going to get sued,” said Brad Sohn, a Miami-based attorney who has represented professional athletes in health-related personal injury matters. “ … I think it's certainly within the realm of possibility, if not probable, that something bad is going to happen [as a result of playing this football season] and somebody's going to sue when that does happen.”
The NCAA, which prohibited schools from requiring that athletes sign coronavirus-related liability waivers, canceled its championship events for fall sports, but it does not control the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision. The Football Championship Subdivision will not play its usual season. Divisions II and III have canceled, too. At the FBS level, 54 of the 130 teams will not play football this fall, while six conferences intend to carry on with fall sports.
College athletes fall into an age group that has an extremely low death rate, but some players could have underlying conditions that increase their risk of severe illness. The long-term effects of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, remain murky. College football decision-makers have recently grown concerned about myocarditis, the inflammation of the heart muscle, which can result from viral illnesses and lead to sudden cardiac death. Those outcomes could prompt legal action against schools, conferences and the NCAA.
The plaintiffs — in this case, athletes and their families — would likely pursue negligence claims, asserting that an entity such as their school failed to exercise reasonable care and that led to an adverse outcome. But they would have to prove the school’s negligence caused an athlete to contract the virus, which may be difficult.
“Could there really be lawsuits where schools have to pay out because of covid? I think that's tricky,” said Dionne Koller, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore. “Could there be a lot of lawsuits over this? Undoubtedly, yes, there would be.”
In negligence claims, the plaintiffs could sue their school, conference and the NCAA. The school’s medical staff has the most direct responsibility for the daily care of athletes and the enforcement of safety protocols. Conferences are offering guidance and requiring some uniform protocols, while also deciding whether the season will go on as planned. Nearly every school has followed in line with its conference, but individual universities can opt out of the season on their own. Old Dominion, a member of Conference USA, did so last week.
The NCAA delegates responsibility to schools and conferences, which could protect the association in a lawsuit because it would assert that it doesn’t have a duty of care to the athletes. Sohn said that if an entity such as the NCAA has undertaken other responsibilities in areas related to sports medicine, the organization may still be liable for its lack of action. Schools, however, have a more clear duty of care.
A school’s defense would be the athletes assumed the risk of playing this season. The NCAA has required that universities honor the scholarships of athletes who opt out of the season because of health concerns. However, athletes could still fear sitting out because of the power imbalance between them and their coaches. They might worry that when they return for the 2021 season, they could have fallen out of favor with the staff that controls their playing time. But when compared against the written assurance that all athletes have the choice to opt out, those intangible concerns would not help an athlete’s case much.
“You'd have to argue that there's so much duress and that there's so much pressure,” Koller said. “And of course, the school's going to be mounting its own side saying, ‘Absolutely not. We told students that they're free to do whatever they want to do.’”
For a school to successfully argue that athletes assumed the risk, the players would have to be fully informed about what could result from the coronavirus. If a school did not educate players about the underlying conditions that increase their risk of suffering from complications or about possible effects of the coronavirus such as myocarditis, an athlete could assert that even though he had a choice to opt out, he didn’t fully understand what he was opting into.
Athletes would then have to show that their school breached its duty of care. While the major conferences all have advisory committees of medical professionals, Sohn said a lawsuit could question whether decision-makers sought guidance in good faith or “are they doing it merely to find somebody who's going to rubber stamp whatever the individual program wants to do so that they can basically justify having people out there doing something that's risky?”
The plaintiffs could argue the schools were aware of the medical risks of playing but chose to proceed anyway. Perhaps evidence of leaders choosing to prioritize the financial need of holding a season over the athletes’ safety could be found through the discovery process. But even without explicit proof, a jury could be asked to make the determination of whether a school breached its duty of care.
“If you saw evidence of a football program's tremendous financial stake in having football versus not having football,” Sohn said, “and then also were able to provide evidence of potentially really shoddy protocol, you could then ask a jury to make the inference that A was linked to B. So it need not be the true smoking gun.”
Other conferences assessing the risks of playing and deciding against holding a fall season “definitely strengthens the argument that a school or a conference [that chooses to play] is breaching its duty of care,” Koller said.
To win a lawsuit against a school in these scenarios, “you'd probably have to show that there was a known failure to follow guidelines,” said Jeremi Duru, a professor of sports law at American University. A breakdown in medical protocols, such as the failure to sanitize equipment or a coach instructing athletes not to report symptoms, would be the simplest way to prove there was negligence.
But a plaintiff would still have to identify a causal link between that negligence and the harm an athlete suffered, which would be difficult. College athletes will not live and practice in a bubble, so there would need to be proof that an athlete contracted the virus as a result of being part of the football program.
“We can all sort of surmise that putting a lot of athletes together in a sport where there’s lots of close contact during a raging pandemic is a bad idea and is probably going to cause cases to spike,” Koller said. “But if you look at actually litigating a case like this, where you have to plead factual allegations, you’ll have to show that that kid got covid from playing on the football team and didn’t get covid from going out to a bar.”
The successful lawsuits would involve athletes who essentially did nothing but attend football practices and meetings. Attorneys might hire contact tracing experts who could link the athlete to an outbreak on the team. They’d still have to show that the school breached its duty of care through not following proper protocols.
“I do not doubt that there will be lawsuits,” Duru said. “The question is whether lawsuits would ultimately be successful. I think what'd you probably see are lawsuits and then, depending on the facts, a fair number of settlements, because I'm not sure that universities want to find themselves going down this line.”
The schools would have some of these legal elements on their side — that athletes assumed the risk or that there’s no clear causal link between the an athletic department’s carelessness and an athlete’s harm. But Koller cited the U.S. women’s national team’s equal pay lawsuit against U.S. Soccer. A judge rejected the argument of the women’s national team that it has been underpaid relative to the U.S. men, but U.S. Soccer still lost “in the court of public opinion,” Koller said.
No school wants to deal with a lawsuit. No coach wants to recruit athletes who know former players have sued their school. Any lawsuit — whether it’s won, lost, settled or dismissed — could hurt the school financially and in perception.
“We can all see with our very own eyes that this is not safe and it’s exposing football players to an unreasonable risk of harm,” Koller said. “Whether the NCAA or schools can come up with one of these defenses and make it stick, either way, they’ve already lost.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/08/17/if-college-football-players-have-complications-coronavirus-expect-lawsuits-follow/

@69aggie Interesting read. The point about winning in court but losing in public opinion is indeed a big one. I wonder what the litigation risks are if a season is cancelled? For example, could players sue that their NFL prospects were impacted or could coaches sue for not having the opportunity to earn a championship bonus? Some G5 schools have been talking about suing Big10 for cancelling. Also curious if there were pandemic or similar clauses in contracts with sponsors, venues, vendors, etc. These are probably non-sequiturs at our level of football, but I could see these being bigger liabilities when you're dealing with Saban types.

I don't even know the legality, but following a thorough examination series, and coming up clean, could a player sign a waiver...freeing up any retribution to the university should a player later contract the virus while playing competitively?

Bottom line, I’m glad our kids are not playing.

Given that the current mortality rate for young people is lower (or far lower) than the seasonal flu, are we now looking at regular shutdowns on college campuses?

Our players are young. They are sons to many parents on this board. If any player dies from the virus it's a preventable tragedy. It's not worth the risk. We also don't know the long term effects of this virus.

Look at SIDs for instance. We changed the whole way we put babies in cribs as a nation for less than a thousand deaths a year. Kids trust adults to make the right choices. We are making the right choice.

Movie makes a good point on mortality rates, but it is now appearing that there are many other diseases that may be a direct result of the Covid virus infection that are not technically in the category of a “mortality” i.e. the new evidence that myocarditis is being detected in many young athletes who have caught and then survived the virus. Myocarditis can be fatal for young athletes. Look what happened at NC State which did not do the right thing at first and then did the right thing. I like Hex’s use of the term “preventable tragedy” as it is right on point. WP article says it all.