Longtime University of New Hampshire athletic director Marty Scarano was a guest on the Brett Franklin Show this week on the Upper Valley's 94 ESPN Radio station and Brett was kind enough to share the sound file with BGA. Scarano offered thoughts about football and college athletics in a time of COVID-19. Here are some of them gently edited for length and clarity.
New Hampshire's perennial FCS football playoff team is slated to play at Kansas this fall. Marty Scarano on the fate of that and other games:
"I don't think any athletic director in the nation can unequivocally tell you, Yeah, we're gonna play a full schedule this fall. I think that you're going to see radical differences in schedules. We don't know what that means yet. But here's the thing that's troubling right now for us: All ADs were hopeful that by the end of June we'd have more clarity on certain things, particularly football. And quite frankly, here we are on the 26th of June and there's less clarity. And we know that the COVID virus is escalating and not declining. So we're not where we hoped we'd be and we're running out of time. I am going to have a conversation with Kansas next week to see where their heads are. And I don't have any specifics to tell them about exactly where UNH is right now. We're planning as best we can to resume practice and play for the fall, but that light is getting a little dimmer all the time.On the possibility of moving football season to the spring for one year:
There's a lot of discussion on lots of different scenarios for seasons of play. Early on there was a lot of discussion about football being played in the spring, and for whatever reason that kind of went away. It's starting to come back in the conversation again as we get closer to August and people start to see that, OK, this COVID thing hasn't really flattened out like we hoped it would. So I think that's in play.On the realization that college athletics in the fall would mean positive COVID-19 tests:
We're planning on how to practice with pods. For example, you don't want all of your quarterbacks working out together necessarily, because if one quarterback is COVID positive then that's going to quarantine your other quarterbacks, which would mean you won't have any quarterbacks. It's daunting. What I'm trying to say is, there are going to be cases if we resume play, in any sport. There's going to be disruption. We know that and we're planning towards it. When I say we, I mean all our respective leagues, whether it be football, whether it be soccer, whether it be field hockey.
New Hampshire and Vermont are very close, aligning across all of our programs with the exception of football. And if UNH has a couple of kids that are COVID positive in soccer, and we're playing Vermont that week, that game is going to be canceled, because we are never going to take the chance of contaminating another team.On a personal reason for wanting to play football this fall – seeing veteran coach Sean McDonnell, a two-time national coach of the year, return to the field after missing last season while he serious battled illness:
No one would want us to play this year more than myself and our fans because of Coach Mac. He and I talk every day. We start the day together. He comes in at eight o'clock and we sit down and talk. He’s a very wise, accomplished coach. He's very pragmatic. And he's troubled by this as well.
Our athletes, regardless of what sport they play, are not commodities. They're individuals and we're trying to grow them up to be great citizens. So at the end of the day, we're going to care about them. But make no mistake. We want to play football. We want to win the championship. We want to go to the FCS playoffs, and I certainly want Coach MacDonnell to have a great end to his career, regardless if it's one year or five years from now.On whether there will be fans at football and other sports this fall:
My staff that oversees marketing and fan experience and all is working hard on that end, but that's low on the queue of priorities. Our number one priority is how do we get to resumption of practice and play to compete with our programs? Secondary to that is, what does that mean for fans? What does that mean for what our attendance will be allowed to be? It obviously is not going to be what it was last year. We have an enormous responsibility to protect any patron that comes to a UNH athletic event.On the impact of the pandemic not just on athletics but on higher education as a whole:
What's happened with the COVID crisis has affected higher education enormously in general, and we're a subset of that, right? I mean, you're going to see colleges and some universities close their doors, unless they can get students back on campus. That's not the case, I'm quite certain, at UNH and Vermont. But the fact of the matter is, I know Vermont. I know certainly, UNH. I know the numbers. It's a devastating financial hit to these institutions.
UNH is heavily weighted with student fees, and the NCAA distribution. I’ve told people, this, and it isn't a secret. UNH athletics lost $4 million in 48 hours in March, when the university refunded $3 million in athletic fees. And then the next day, we got notice that we lost $1 million in NCAA distribution. So that's a roundabout way of saying that we're reviewing everything. That does not mean program elimination, but we're being scrutinized, just as every single academic unit and every college at the university is being scrutinized.
It's really a reflection of what higher education is going through. Students are going to probably rely more on online learning and maybe even gravitate to that because it's more cost effective for them, which is going to hurt residential schools like UNH and UVM and University of Maine. So it's a real problem, and it's affecting everybody that's associated with higher education and it includes athletics.On the tail that wags the dog (and it's not football):
The biggest issue surrounding all of intercollegiate sports, regardless of who you are, is protecting the basketball tournament. I think people that follow sports understand if there is no NCAA Basketball Tournament again, that basically is a collapse of the whole industry of collegiate sports. I mean, that seeds, everything. So all of us, at every Division I school that sponsors basketball, has to protect basketball, and we have to protect the tournament. The NCAA is willing to do just about anything to be assured that there's going to be an NCAA basketball tournament. It really starts and stops there.
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From Fox sports (LINK):Morehouse College, an NCAA Division II school, announced Friday it has canceled its college football season along with the rest of the fall athletics schedule amid fears over coronavirus.
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The Oregon-Oregon State football game will no longer be called the Civil War. (LINK)
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EXTRA POINTA TigerBlog post the other day mentioned that there's going to be a new Top Gun movie, which I had somehow missed. We re-watched the original Top Gun during our stay-at-home movie watching a few weeks ago and so I was interested to look up the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, due in theaters on Dec. 23. (LINK)
Knowing the original Top Gun story the trailer makes sense. Most of them, these days, do not. Here's what's missing:
