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/

Have to admit I didn't know I was clarifying anything. ...just wanted to add the "official" conference press release. Six months into this thing and today's postponements could very well beomce tomorrow's cancellations...."or we could just wake up one morning and like a miracle it will be gone."

https://pac-12.com/article/2020/08/11/pac-12-conference-postpones-all-sport-competitions-through-end-calendar-year

We certainly don't have as many as other schools. USC water polo, Sac State tennis...are a couple of examples.

The BIg Ten becomes the first Power 5 conference to postpone fall sports, including football. https://bigten.org/news/2020/8/11/general-big-ten-statement-on-2020-21-fall-season.aspx

As one of our members* points out, water polo (and tennis) seem to be overloaded with foreign born players. That presents further issues with the pandemic and the current administration's immigration policies.

(*Davisbear? 69Aggie? With my memory every day is an Easter egg hunt.)

FIeld hockey is on life support if that. America East has postponed all fall sports. UC, UCD and Stanford (the defending champion) extended their associate membership agreement through 2020, but that means little with the postponement. Stanford is dropping the sport after the 2020 season, so it is effectively dead. Cal has struggled to keep its program, not even having a home field one season. I think Fiat Lux is correct that field hockey will be cut and probably replaced by rowing to keep women's sports in compliance with Title IX.

The Western Water Polo Ass'n has not announced plans for the forthcoming season. While the UCD men's water polo team has had success in the past few seasons, we have to admit that they are playing in a less competitive league. Most Big West schools play in the Golden Coast Conference and the Ags would probably be a middle of the conference team there with a tougher path to the NCAA tourney. Being endowed helps their chances of survival.

Mountain West follows MAC and postpones all fall sports:
https://themw.com/news/2020/8/10/general-mountain-west-postpones-2020-fall-sports.aspx

Big Ten may follow:
https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/2020/08/10/big-ten-football-cancels-season-michigan-michigan-state/3332277001/

Or, maybe not:
https://247sports.com/Article/Big-Ten-refutes-report-of-canceled-football-season-college-COVID-19-pandemic-150086770/

I looked at last year's equestrian schedule. They had a few dates where they travelled to Fresno and had more than one match. (A lot of sports do this, it is not unique to equestrian.) It gives the California teams a couple of matches and helps justify the travel for the team from the east or midwest. In that situation would Fresno provide horses for both the out-of-state team and for Davis?

Equestrian is much like field hockey in that there is little if any competition in California. I think the only other California school with an equestrian team is Fresno State. After that it's Texas. If you drop field hockey and equestrian, you probably have to pick up something like rowing.

Sad to see this happening in 2020. I am by birth and family heritage an Iowa Hawkeye fan. They have been rocked by accusations of racism by team and athletic department people. Strength coach has "retired." I thought the head coach was a stand-up guy, but among those accused of racist behavior is his son, who is an assistant. You would think that athletics (and the arts) would be more appreciative of diversity. But I'm an old white guy, what do I know? (As my kids remind me...)

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.

As long as they never touch the ground.....whatever the color, finish, logo....

And then there's that school in South Bend, IN.....the one that copied the Aggie uniform color scheme.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/notre-dame-football-fools_b_10963806

...as a friend says, 'no question goes unanswered in the age of smart phones and google."

Helmets are typically "reconditioned" at least every two years and should be replaced at least every ten years.

More info on costs and repainting:

https://blogs.usafootball.com/blog/819/helmet-reconditioning-is-critical-to-proper-equipment-maintenance

My nominal involvement with a (successful) HS football program, purely as a parent, led me to believe that the schools send helmets to manufacturers or some testing service frequently, like every other year or maybe even every year. I suppose I could google this, but.....

As I have said once or twice I am retired and married and staying at home is right in my skill set. The people I really feel for are the young singles. We have two 30-something single children. One has been laid off but hopes to go back to work in a month, the other is preparing to move cross-country for a new job. Neither was seeing anyone when this thing started and meeting and dating is hard enough in good times but so much harder now. We have neighbors with teen age daughters. One finished her senior year in high school - no commencement, no prom, still not sure if she is going away to college or going to continue at home and take online classes. Another turned 16 last month and had to wait until last week to get an appointment with DMV to get a driver’s license. Very cute girls, but no social life to speak of. I should probably be happy about that because I am not dealing with boys driving by at all hours of the night. So much of being in high school and college is learning to socialize. I remember every stupid thing I did around girls, or all the dumb things I did after a few drinks, but fifty years down the road I have yet to use the quadratic formula in my life.

Hang in there, “this too shall pass.”

I actually saw a Steelheads' game at the Nut Tree. All I remember was that one of the "promos" was a drawing that let the winner sit in a couch in the front row of the seats on the first base side. It was an independent league and I went with a family member who knew a guy who was on his last days as a player. He'd made it to AAA, but the writing was on the wall. He soon gave up playing, but I think is now a hitting coach in the bigs.