Anybody have Indiana beating Penn State in overtime on the road?

I'm a generation up on you. My dad was in college as the war broke out. Finished his undergrad in three years and medical school in another three because curricula were compressed for the war effort. Went to Europe in the army of occupation in '46 or '47. Had an uncle who was in heavy combat. I think he was in North Africa, but for sure landed at Anzio and spent three days under fire in a foxhole on the beach. My Dad says the uncle (his brother-in-law) was never the same when he returned. Probably what we now call post traumatic stress disorder.

And to wander further off topic my father-in-law was a pretty decent baseball player. He was stationed in the U.K. as a mechanic in the army air corps during WWII. They would patch up planes after bombing missions to get them ready for the next raid, then play ball the rest of the day. A bit like "M*A*S*H" in that they would often play against other airbases in England. I always joked that he kept the world safe for democracy by playing ball.

Point made, and it does feel weird. The whole season feels weird. I follow a Big Ten team out of family loyalty. The conference started play last weekend. Coming up on the second weekend of play and the Wisconsin vs Nebraska game has already been cancelled. Those two teams could be competing for the conference’s West division title, but they will not play. All very strange.

(Not to be a jerk about this, this is not the first season the Ags have not played football. (Three "nots" in one sentence...?) UC Davis started playing football in 1915. They did not compete in 1918 due to WWI and from 1943 to 1945 due to WWII.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucdavisaggies.com/documents/2019/8/29/_19_FB_Record_Book.pdf )

I have to begrudgingly admit there are practical reasons for names on the uniforms. Look at a program like USC. There are so many players that numbers are repeated with a number on an offensive player and the same number on a defensive player. The game program (at a small forutne) doesn't help as much as having the name on the jersey does.

I'm old...love the classic navy, er, Yale blue, jerseys & gold pants with the gold helmet.

Don't know why any team needs more than a home uni and a road uni, but I guess the players like it. Never figured out why we have grey on any uniform. Not a Davis color, and looks like Nevada or Georgetown or a Civil War reenactment. I'm also enough of an old guy that I like the idea of not having names on the jerseys. No "I" in team...but I guess there's an "I" in uniform. Whatever people might say about USC, they don't have names on their jerseys. They have worn the same uniforms for years. They win more than they lose. (Yeah, maybe USC cannot pay for new uniforms with all the fines and judgments the school is paying for this and that, as well as paying us to get out of a contract...and they no longer earn money from worried Hollywood types trying to get their kids into school by claiming they play on the squash team.)

Took the dog for some exercise at Sac this morning. Football team conducting what I guess are off-off season practices.

...to say nothing of the cost associated with dealing with the pandemic itself....medical testing, finding space to keep players and staff at a safe distance,...medical costs when players and staff test positive, ...i assume medical insurance costs will rise, too. And all without ticket and concession revenue.

From Sac's athletic site:
https://www.hornetsports.com/sports/fball/2020-21/releases/20201015i09uoy

From the Bee:
https://www.sacbee.com/sports/college/article246477230.html

I was raised to hate Notre Dame, but did see a football game there in late fall about 15 years ao. Something a college football fan ought to do once in life. The spirit, the fall colors...what football should be.

"I'm in!"

There is a story, perhaps fictional, that many years ago a broadcaster (Chris Schenkel??) referred to Southern Methodist University teams as the "Ponies" because Chevrolet advertised the broadcasts and he didn't want to give any publicity to Ford Mustangs.

"For what purpose? Why test healthy young people, and healthy asymptomatic young people?"

Just a guess, but to make sure they are healthy?

Thoughts, prayers and best wishes go out to Coach Biggs and his family. From everything I have seen or read about him, he is, as Dr. Mike notes, "a quality person. A real Aggie legend." I believe he is a man of great faith. I trust that will be a great source of strength for him. A big "Go Ags!" to the Coach.

If we have rowing, wrestling, squash or cycling they are all at the club & rec sport level, rather than the inter-scholastic team sport (NCAA, etc.) level. Add rugby from your narrative, though not on your enumerated list. (And FWIW, rugby is more like soccer than football in that teams play for a something close to two continuous 45 minute halves, not the 5 seconds of action followed by 30-40 seconds of huddle in gridiron football, but I digress.) Club sports are really going to suffer with fewer students on campus and less money. I think it's safe to assume that the school isn't going to be coming up with a lot of financial support for club, rec, and IM sports. AND the associations that sanction those sports may not do so this coming school year. Field hockey will die for lack of competition in the Pacific and Mountain time zones.

Riveraggie, the internet and sports chat sites are terrible places to express these things, but I am sorry to hear of your losses. My thoughts, wishes and prayers go out to you.

The cruel side of cutting sports as Iowa cuts four of them. (Iowa "released" their football conditioning coach over allegations of racism. They buyout of this one coach would have funded the four sports that were cut.)

https://www.si.com/college/2020/08/25/iowa-cuts-sports-swimming-gymnastics-tennis

Tough to be a Hawkeye fan, though I somehow still am.

Half a year into this thing and little about it is a "given." Remember when it was going to decline in the heat of the summer? More and more stories about serious conditions that fall short of mortality....unclear if younger people will transmit the disease even if they are asyptomatic themselves. New stories every week about whether or not those infected will develop any immunity and if so, for how long. I find myself constantly saying, "We don't know what he don't know." Not a real profound thought but seems to be a fair comment.

Do the posters who take shots at Davis indicate where they are from?

(I was not clear in my reply. I suspected you were being sarcastic. Wonder if the detractors suspected as much.)

"...move to FBS. You know, just like the Ivy schools!"

Which are FCS, and play, I think, only a ten game schedule in a non-pandemic year, AND do not compete in football play-offs. Friend of mine was on an "olympic sport" team at an Ivy. School is now, AGAIN, threatening to cut the sport and the alums are reaching into their wallets.

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/